Microsoft announced this morning the acquisition of Austin, Texas-based Incent Games, the makers of a “sales gamification” platform called FantasySalesTeam. Microsoft has snapped up Incent Games, the developer of FantasySalesTeam. Through team-based competition and involvement of non-sales employees (such as managers, service, operations, marketing and finance) employees “draft” teams and become truly invested in each other’s success. Microsoft says today it will make this feature available to its own customers in order to help them incentivize their sales teams and achieve better results.

It tries to deal with an age-old sales problem: most companies suffer from the same sales leaders dominating traditional incentives systems, causing other team members to lose interest quickly as they think they’ll never be able to catch up.

Redmond just made an interesting acquisition on the customer relationship management (CRM) front.

FantasySalesTeam brings in an innovative twist that combines gamification with fantasy sports and applies it to a sales setting. Individual and team results become highly visible, driving both competition as well as collaboration and creating positive, impactful cultural change. There are case studies to back up his claims. For instance, Service Corporation global piloted the software with 130 reps and compared their performance to 700 others.

And Service Corporation International’s results were not a fluke. Wireless Zone, a chain of cellular and mobile stores, has increased total sales by 176 percent and increased profit by 9 percent during the first month of running the software, according to the Stutz. “We believe that motivating users of Dynamics CRM to focus on their most important metrics while simultaneously increasing usage and adoption can help drive tremendous impact on our customer’s success”.

“It’s really driven by group dynamics”, Shimmin said. “Just as we saw with things like SEO in the 1990s, people and companies will “game” the system”.