Sales leaderboards are becoming increasingly prevalent in today's workplace, particularly in data-driven businesses. They offer a terrific way to ignite competition, display results, and foster a thriving culture. Companies increasingly use this tactic to entice, engage, and incentivize their employees.
Since sales leaderboards provide a dynamic performance evaluation and motivating mechanism, they are valuable across all businesses that require a strong sales force, from retail stores to call centers, auto dealerships, banks, and everything in between.
Discover how sales leaderboards can save your company time, money, missed deadlines, and better visibility into the data that matters to you and each of your departments.
Benefits of Sales Leaderboards
Internal competition is something that many businesses avoid, like the plague. Sales teams must realize and appreciate the strength of working together toward a single goal. Sales executives may aid by presenting their employees' vital indicators indicating the importance of teamwork in achieving success. Furthermore, sales executives must understand the role that technology, such as a sales leaderboard/ dashboard, may play in supporting and boosting their team's competitive culture.
The most important advantage of adopting a sales leaderboard is that it fosters healthy rivalry among sales teams. However, there are several additional benefits to adopting a leaderboard. The visible ones are listed below:
1 – Model of Coaching is Improved
Data is one of the most effective weapons in the hands of the top coaches. When you add leaderboards to your sales management toolkit, you can see where your team is having trouble, which activities require more attention, and which routine chores aren't pushing the needle fast enough to produce results. It allows you to communicate each team member's performance through the power of visual communication.
This type of insight is extremely valuable for team growth. A leader might use the leaderboard to spot a weak link that needs to be bolstered—or let go. It might assist a leader in identifying scheduling gaps in their team.
2 – Fostering a Healthy Competitive Team Spirit
A sales scoreboard is a simple yet powerful approach to increase engagement, enhance coaching, encourage openness, and provide you and your team with real-time feedback. When these elements are combined, they create a competitive internal culture that thrives.
Assess a leaderboard as part of your management stack when you consider your sales staff and how to enhance engagement. It can potentially shift your team's perspective on competition and boost their drive to pick up the phone, make a cold call, and close a new business.
3 – More Sales Transparency
There are many advantages to being able to see how everyone on the team is doing with their outbound activity, inbound efforts, and email outreach—the most important of which is that no one wants to be at the bottom of the list, so the team members will work harder to achieve results that are comparable to their colleagues'.
A leaderboard improves motivation and ensures that there is nowhere to hide when it comes to reaching objectives and expectations by tapping into a sales rep's natural urge to compare their performance to others.
4 – Increased Employee Engagement
Only 29% of employees are actively involved in their employment, according to Gallup Management Journal, while 54% are not interested at all. Over the years, several case studies have underscored the importance of having a motivated staff.
Sales leaderboards show how committed the team is, while also encouraging additional participation. The last thing you want is a sales staff that sleepwalks to quota without ever aiming for a little more. A leaderboard may help achieve this goal by recognizing the best salesperson and making the sales experience more gamified for the entire team.
It's important to remember that only 10-20% of your sales team will appear on any particular leaderboard in most cases.
Sales executives should think about how to emphasize the work and growth of their agents, who aren't always the best in their industry. For instance, reveal who has improved the most over time rather than merely who has accomplished the most. Remember that the goal is to improve the performance of every single member of your team, not simply your top salespeople.
5 – Real-time Feedback
The finest sales leaderboards are linked directly to your CRM, ensuring that your team's activities and leaderboard rankings are always in sync. You don't want to see minutes or hours late updates while you're checking in on a basketball game. It's the same situation here—nobody wants their sales leaderboard to reflect outdated critical numbers.
Our CRM's built-in sales dashboard instantly receives all sales data in real-time. This is critical for individual team members and sales leaders, who must report progress to the C-suite or board of directors.
6 – Gamification in the Workplace Boosts Productivity
While sales is a dynamic business, it nevertheless involves a lot of repetition. When you're calling yet another number or drafting yet another report, even the finest performers may have that glazed-over expression in their eyes.
Sales leaderboard software energizes the sales team; when new mechanics (particularly game-like elements) are brought into the process, everyone becomes hyper-aware.
Employees may be performing repetitive activities, but it becomes less tedious if their progress is recorded on a leaderboard, and they can see how it contributes to a larger goal. It's much greater when you add multiple tiers and badges. After all, one of the most powerful motivators for people is status and rewards.
7 – Sales Leaderboards Reduce Workplace Stress
Sales leaderboards create a healthy rivalry that leads to better performance and reduces workplace stress. There will be no incentive for colleagues to use sick days if they can compete in a more relaxed manner while feeling more accomplished.
How to Build Dashboards and Sales Leaderboards with Plecto
Sales teams using Close CRM can already use their built-in sales leaderboard feature, but by integrating Plecto with Close, leaderboards become even more powerful. As a business, you want your sales team to work effectively. Overall, you want to increase engagement by providing your team with real-time feedback and improving sales transparency.
That's where Plecto comes in handy. Plecto uses virtual sales dashboards to inspire sales teams, and may be used in three ways by sales teams:
1 – Applaud Your Team for Recent 'Victories'
You may immediately tell your team about fresh Close opportunities, concluded transactions, or incoming calls with Plecto–with instant notifications! You decide what a "win" is and how you celebrate it–play a custom sound, show the closer's headshot, type a custom message, or do all three.
When a salesperson closes a deal, makes a particular amount of calls, or generates a new lead, the entire team hears about it.
Plecto aims to create a more engaging and collaborative work atmosphere and keep representatives responsible by allowing you to tailor how you reward agents' success.
2 – Encourage Your Team to Achieve Goals
Plecto also allows you to define accomplishments and recognize achievers with badges that appear next to the agent's name on specified dashboards. Affix a happy face to the representative with the best customer satisfaction rating or display a star symbol next to a "sales star!" This sales gamification technique naturally incorporates set goals and targets into everyday selling and encourages your whole team to get involved in celebrating individual and team goals.
3 – Create a Competitive Environment for Your Team
One of Plecto's unique features is its leaderboard, which allows you to rank teams based on your criteria. Plecto can feed call or sales statistics directly from Close to highlight who on your team is making the most calls or closing the most transactions, which creates an exciting work atmosphere where teams strive to succeed. This results in increased productivity, since failing to make calls or close sales will result in a dip in the leaderboard.
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Key Takeaways
1 — An increasing number of companies are implementing sales leaderboards to boost productivity and boost employee happiness. They also bring a number of unintended advantages. Highly motivated employees have the potential to significantly boost your revenue. Leaderboards also aid in managing and analyzing sales reps' performance. They provide invaluable insights that allow managers to make informed decisions by comparing multiple sales reps simultaneously.
2 — Sales leaderboards should support your work atmosphere. Leaderboards can demotivate reps if they are not used wisely. They can lead to an overly competitive and antagonistic workplace environment–with unfavorable effects on salespeople. Remember that leaderboards and other sales gamification features should be used to boost the performance of your entire team, not just top performers! To do so, make sure you are empathetic and empowering in your coaching, and maintain mutual respect with your agents.
3 — When any of your sales reps are underperforming, identify the cause so you can address challenges or problem areas. Are the leads they're working with, for example, not quality ones? Are they lacking in information or tools? Is it possible that they haven't had the right sales training? Sales leaderboards help highlight areas that deserve closer examination so you can give your reps the support they need to excel.
Integrate your Close CRM data with Plecto and excel today!
Now that you know exactly how to use sales leaderboards to improve individual and team performance, why not give it a try yourself?
Plecto transforms the way you track your company's progress. Combine this with Close CRM's powerful sales automation tools, and you'll get an all-in-one dashboard to visualize your data in real-time and include your entire team in the success of your business!
Sign up for a 14-day FREE Plecto trial here and start outperforming today!
Want more advice on building and managing high-performing sales teams? Download a free copy of my book, 'The Sales Hiring Playbook'.
This guest blog post is by Steli Efti, CEO at Close (Close.com)
