Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
The client
GAMIFICATION+ is a UK-based, globally recognised leader in gamification consultancy and training. Their team has collectively spoken at more than 150 events and trained more than 10,000 people in the use of gamification. They organise the Gamification Europe conference and the global Gamification Awards.
The problem
Gamification+ had a sales-process visibility problem, and the cause was very specific.
“Management no longer had visibility on the sales pipeline as no data was being entered into the CRM.”
The team had moved their day-to-day collaboration into Microsoft Teams. Anything that lived outside Teams stopped getting touched. The CRM was outside Teams. So the data dried up.
“If the system wasn’t usable in Teams then it wasn’t going to get used at all.”
The immediate challenge, in their words, was to add CRM functionality into the Teams environment and enable users to enter sales data again. Three constraints came with it: keep the data inside the corporate Microsoft 365 tenancy, support staff who travel and access work from many points, and make collaboration on shared opportunities easy.
The solution
We built Aardvark Sales for Teams: a kanban board, living in a Teams channel, reading and writing the team’s sales-opportunity data in SharePoint Online.
Sales opportunities moved between stages with drag and drop, exactly as you’d expect. Custom fields could be added to the underlying SharePoint list and the Aardvark interface adapted to display them on cards. The board could be added to any channel or Team multiple times, configured to roll up data at channel level or across the whole Team.
All of the gamification-aware extras Gamification+ wanted (a sales progress bar, in particular) were built directly into their configuration. The board sat next to Teams chat, video, calendar, and the channel file repository, so a conversation about an opportunity was always one tab away.
The result
The outcomes were straightforward to observe.
And from the client directly:
“I got Aardvark Sales for Teams up and running in less than an hour. I then used the customisation features to fit our unique requirements and had the solution delivered to my sales team by the end of that day.”
“We very quickly saw an uptick in sales, and in the quality of those sales, when we started using Aardvark Sales for Teams.”
Pete Jenkins, CEO, Gamification+ Ltd.
What this proved, and what came next
Gamification+ is the case study that proved the model. The argument it settled, at least for us, was a simple one: a planning view does not have to own the data, and a process-management tool does not have to be a methodology. If the place where work already happens is Microsoft 365, the right move is to surface what’s already in the lists, in the surface people already use, with a board they can drag.
Process Planner is what that thesis became, at scale.
It is a native SharePoint Framework (SPFx) web part now, not just a Teams app: the board can live on any SharePoint page in your tenant, and the Teams tab is an optional projection of the same view. It can unify lists across sites into one board, where Aardvark was one list per board. It ships with more than thirty business templates instead of the single Sales Pipeline that Gamification+ started with. It handles boards with a thousand or more items without slowing down, queues changes when connectivity drops, and detects concurrent edits by other users before they overwrite yours.
The thesis is the same. The toolbox is bigger.
Ready to run your processes better?
Process Planner is available on the Microsoft commercial marketplace. Install it on your SharePoint tenant and add it to any page or Teams channel where the work happens.