Challenges
A Challenge is the goal users work toward. It holds the rules that award points, defines what counts as progress, and fires the completion rewards when someone crosses the finish line.
Rules only award points while a Challenge is active. Activity before a challenge starts does not count.
What makes a good challenge?
- A clear objective (“Improve pipeline hygiene”)
- A short timeframe: 1 to 4 weeks works best
- Two to four rules, not ten
- Visible progress (leaderboard, badges, progress bar)
- Some kind of recognition at the end
Frequent, lightweight challenges outperform long, complex ones.
More on this in Designing Effective Challenges.
Challenge types
One-time
No time limit · Progress never resets
No time pressure. Progress accumulates until the target is met. Good for onboarding steps or career milestones that don’t need urgency.
Timebound
Fixed start and end date · Progress never resets
Rules only count activity inside that window, creating urgency. Use for quarterly campaigns, end-of-month pushes, or anything with a real deadline. Participants also see goal pace.
Recurring
Resets weekly, monthly, or quarterly
When a period ends, progress goes back to zero and a new cycle starts automatically. Good for building habits and pairs well with consistency badges.
Head-to-head (person vs person)
Two people · Winner declared at the end date
Two named people race on points between a start and end date. There is no goal target; both see a live score, and the higher total wins.
Head-to-head (team vs team)
Two teams · Winner declared at the end date
Two Public Groups compete on points. Member scores combine into a side score, by average or by total, and every member of the winning side gets the reward.
Head-to-head battles
A battle is a challenge that pits two sides against each other instead of setting a shared target. Both sides see a live score while the battle runs, and when the end date passes the side with the higher score wins. The two head-to-head types decide what a side is: Head-to-head (person vs person) holds two named people, and Head-to-head (team vs team) holds two Public Groups. In the builder a person battle shows two people pickers and a team battle shows two team pickers, so the sides can never be mismatched.
Battles are always timebound. They need a start date and an end date, and the winner is resolved by the nightly job shortly after the end date passes.
Team scoring
A team battle has to combine its members’ points into one side score, and Team scoring on the challenge decides how:
- Average per member (the default): the side’s total divided by its active member count. This compares teams of different sizes fairly, which is why it is the default.
- Total points: every member’s points added up. This rewards the whole team’s output, so it favours the bigger roster. The builder warns you when the two teams are different sizes.
A person battle never asks the question: a side has exactly one member, and both modes give the same number.
Winning
On a decisive win, the challenge’s completion bonus and completion badge go to every member of the winning side, once each. Like all completion rewards, the awards are protected against duplicates, so a re-run of the nightly job never pays twice. Level scores are a draw: the battle ends with no winner and no reward.
Team membership is resolved at scoring time, not at the start of the battle. Someone who joins a team mid-battle contributes their points from the whole battle window, and someone who leaves stops contributing entirely. A side’s score can therefore jump, up or down, the moment the Public Group changes. This is by design, not a scoring bug: the group as it stands is the team that competes.
Team battles need curated teams
The team battle type is always offered in the type picker, but its side pickers stay empty until at least one Public Group has been added on the Teams card in Novigem Admin > Settings > General, the same list that powers challenge scoping (see Who takes part below and General settings). The builder points you there when no teams are set up yet.
Goal pace
A challenge with both a start and an end date shows each participant whether they are Ahead of pace, On track, or Behind pace against the time left, not just how far along they are. Behind pace adds a detail line with the rate needed to still finish, such as “Need 4/day to finish”.
Pace allows a small tolerance band, one tenth of the target, so a rep who is marginally behind still reads as on track. Completed challenges and challenges without a window show no pace at all.
Who takes part
By default, everyone. A challenge with no team set applies to the whole org, and that needs no configuration at all.
To narrow it, set Applies to on the challenge to a team. Teams in Novigem are Salesforce Public Groups, not a separate Novigem concept, so the group has to exist in Setup first.
The team picker is empty until an admin says which Public Groups take part, on the Teams card in Admin > Settings > General. Most orgs have many public groups that have nothing to do with Novigem, so participation is opt-in rather than a list of all of them.
A rule’s own team is ignored when it belongs to a challenge
This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth stating plainly.
Rules can carry a team as well as challenges. When a rule belongs to a challenge, the challenge’s team decides who takes part and the rule’s own team is ignored, including when the challenge is organisation-wide. A rule scoped to Sales, attached to an org-wide challenge, applies to everyone.
The alternative would be to apply both, and that fails in a way nobody can diagnose: a rule scoped to Sales sitting under a challenge scoped to Customer Success would qualify nobody at all, with no error and no empty-state to explain it. One of the two has to win, and the challenge is the one the admin is looking at.
A rule that belongs to no challenge falls back to its own team.
Removing a team later does not widen a challenge
Taking a Public Group off the Teams card stops it being offered in the pickers. It does not un-scope challenges already using it. A challenge scoped to a team keeps that scope until someone changes the challenge itself.
That is deliberate. Silently widening the audience would start awarding points to people an admin had chosen to exclude.
How users get enrolled
There is no sign-up step. Users are enrolled in a challenge the first time a matching rule awards them points. Novigem creates a Challenge Progress record on the spot.
This means a user will not appear in a challenge’s participant list until they have triggered at least one rule. If someone has not earned points, they are not yet in the challenge.
Completion rewards
When a user reaches the target, two optional rewards can fire:
- Completion bonus: extra points, awarded once per completion
- Completion badge: a badge linked on the challenge, also awarded once
Both are protected against duplicate awards. If the same completion fires twice, only the first one counts.
Suggested challenges
When peers regularly earn points from a rule that some reps never trigger, Novigem proposes a challenge to close that gap. Accepting it creates, in one click, a 14-day Timebound challenge called Close the gap: {rule name}, with a Count metric, a target of 3, and a 25-point completion bonus.
Creating a suggested challenge needs the Novigem Admin permission set. The same gap shows up for the rep as a rule gap coaching signal.
Measuring a challenge
Challenge Impact is the admin screen that compares participants’ tracked activity before, during, and after a challenge. It reports two numbers:
- Activity Lift: did behaviour change while the challenge ran
- Retention: did the change hold once it ended
A challenge that lifts activity but retains none of it is a spike, not a habit. Use both numbers when deciding what to run next.
Example challenge ideas
Sales: Pipeline Momentum
Points for updating next steps, moving stages, and closing deals.
Customer Success: Account Engagement
Reward touchpoints, health score actions, and renewal prep.
Support: Response Quality
Points for resolving cases within SLA and adding complete notes.
Operations: Clean Data Sprint
Reward field completeness and validation compliance.
Common pitfalls
- Rewarding activity instead of outcomes: scoring busywork drives busywork
- Too many overlapping rules: users lose track of what earns what
- Challenges that run too long: engagement drops sharply beyond 4 to 6 weeks
- Unclear objectives: simple and visible goals get the most traction
Related
- Create your first challenge: step-by-step guide
- Challenges builder reference: all fields explained
- Designing effective challenges: principles for programs that actually work
- Rules, Badges, Coaching, Ledger, Progress tracking