October 30, 2012
By Kelly Liyakasa,

ePrize Spins off New Company LevelEleven

Loyalty promotions and digital campaigns company ePrize today announced the formation of LevelEleven, an enterprise gamification and CRM solutions spinoff that received $1 million in seed funding from Detroit Venture Partners to continue its product buildout.

At the helm of the new venture is CEO Bob Marsh, a 13-year ePrize executive, who says LevelEleven was built on the premise of keeping salespeople engaged in their CRM systems. As a company, ePrize itself had discovered that remaining inside Salesforce.com and updating pertinent records and information took some incentive.

"Companies [realize that making] an investment in an enterprise CRM [like Salesforce.com] is an expensive proposition, and the whole idea and vision you're buying into is, 'I'm going to be able to measure all this sales activity, and when I can measure it, I can motivate it,'" Marsh comments.

ePrize, which launched sales gamification app Sales Contest Builder for Salesforce.com at the Dreamforce conference last year, has transitioned the product line to LevelEleven, which Marsh foresees receiving continual engineering investment to improve and grow the product.

Contest Builder is used by customer companies like Comcast, Concur Technologies, and the Detroit Pistons as a sales competition tool and engagement reinforcer.

"We're seeing on both the consumer and B2B side...brand and sales channel managers struggling with, 'How do I keep the attention of that consumer or that salesperson?'" remarks Matt Wise, CEO of ePrize. "That's where you're seeing the entertaining, contest [approaches] as opposed to pushing a message out to the consumer or the sales manager pushing a message down to a rep."

With the ever-increasing popularity of enterprise gamification, both in a B2B and B2C context, LevelEleven is eyeing the behavioral driver for more than one business process. Though sales, historically, has been a venue for competitive leaderboards and notions like the president's club, gamification is well on its way into impacting the service organization, as well.

Service-related organizations like contact centers can benefit from a gamified contest or approach to resolution by setting parameters for performance and subsequent reward, the company claims. LevelEleven came out with a release a couple of months ago that allows Salesforce.com Service Cloud users to build a gamified response program using the case management tool.