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Dynamics CRM biz gobble lets bosses play fantasy league ... at work ... using sales reps

Donkey, meet carrot – and stick

Microsoft has gobbled up FantasySalesTeam-maker Incent Games, and will bake the software into its Dynamics CRM product.

Incent calls FantasySalesTeam "sales gamification" (no, me neither). Rather than dangle a big carrot in front of sales reps – like a fat end-of-year bonus – it lets managers offer lots of smaller prizes to staffers who meet various goals. The whole thing has a sports theme to it, with players, sorry, employees earning points for each metric hit.

"To help drive adoption of our CRM solutions in fun and creative ways, we are integrating FantasySalesTeam into our offering," said Bob Stutz, veep of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM team, on Monday.

The FantasySalesTeam software is already in extensive use by HP, Comcast, and others, and Microsoft says it will carry on supporting the software, even if it is being used with other CRM systems like Salesforce.com.

Presumably, however, Microsoft will be hoping the FantasySalesTeam software will make its Dynamics platform more popular, and there may be some Office integration so that managers can set up incentive schemes outside of a CRM system and simply output the results to an Excel spreadsheet.

The financial terms of the deal haven't been made public, but Incent scored over $2m in venture capital since it started. The current staff will remain, although they will be moving up to the Redmond campus.

Still, you have to wonder if all this software is really necessary. Whatever happened to just paying a good commission? ®

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