Sales leaderboards are growing in popularity in the modern workplace, especially in sales-driven organizations. Businesses are increasingly adopting the tool to entice, engage and incentivize their employees. Through gamification and real-time recognition, organizations are enhancing the productivity of their salespeople. With leaderboards offering a dynamic performance measurement and motivation system, it is beneficial across all industries that need a strong sales force – from retail stores to call centers, car dealerships, banks, and everything else in between.
In this article, we will discuss the key features and benefits of a sales leaderboard. But first, let us discuss the leaderboard and how you can get your sales teams excited to adopt the idea.
What is a leaderboard?
A leaderboard is a scoreboard that shows the names and current scores of the leading competitors. It is usually seen in golf matches. However, almost all industries are adopting the concept of leaderboards to praise the top performers, motivate individuals, and develop healthy competition among peers.
Healthy competition is always good for the business growth. It can drive people to do the best work they can. You can see the examples of leaderboards everywhere – in gaming, with apps like Fitbit that send you a summary of your performance against others, in Grammarly that indicates your writing improvement, to name some.
That is the basic idea behind sales leaderboards as well – to create an environment of healthy competition that not only helps salespeople do their best but inevitably drives up the overall productivity and revenue metrics for your organization.
To explain it better:
What is a sales leaderboard?
Sales leaderboard is an application that tracks the performance of your sales team against business goals. Using this application, you can display the performances of individuals side by side. Thus, making it simpler to determine which team members are ahead of their target. That said, you can also customize the sales leaderboard software depending on your business objective. For instance, you can track the performance on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Key Features of Sales Leaderboard
Sales leaderboard offers several features to improve the efficiency of your sales team. Some of these features are as follows.
1. Sales Dashboard
The sales dashboard is the most crucial feature of the leaderboard. It acts as the window to your entire sales process. Using the dashboard, you can compare team and individual performance over a period. This allows you to analyze the sales data with more clarity.
For instance, a regular sales report will not tell you who is ahead and by how much. You will also find it challenging to identify the average performance benchmarks. With leaderboards, you can quickly get to know these metrics. Moreover, if you dig deeper, you can also figure out what has led the leading person to achieve his targets.
Another benefit of leaderboards is, you can compare month on month data. Such sales performance insights act as an indicator of the health of your sales strategy. With these insights, sales managers can also tweak their sales strategies to address prolonged sales time and lost deals.
2. Forecast Reports
Another key feature of the leaderboard is its ability to forecast sales performance. Based on past data, the application can give an overview of future sales numbers. Thus, assisting sales managers plan their sales strategies for next month. In your sales strategy you can also formulate incentive compensation plans based on certain tiers of target achievements.
The leaderboard also predicts the number of leads you must close to achieve the target. Therefore, allowing the sales managers to drive better results against a time-bound target. Moreover, forecasting reports also increases the accountability of your sales reps.
3. Integration
You can also integrate the leaderboard with various third-party applications. The integration allows managers to share information with the sales team members easily. For instance, through the integration of a leaderboard with a communication tool, managers can share any good or bad news with their team members at once. Thus, motivating and inspiring their sales team. Moreover, it also promotes active communication with team members.
Managers can share ideas, news, and social events, along with other information. Thus, ensuring that the team members are speaking with each other. It will eventually foster better collaboration and results for the business.
For instance, LeadSquared Sales CRM gives you a complete picture of your sales reps’ performances, accomplishments, revenue generated, and more at individual and team levels. Plus, it seamlessly integrates with several third-party apps and software (including modern-day concepts like sales leaderboards).
Why sales leaderboard software?
With sales leaderboard software, you can see direct benefits on employee productivity. It instills healthy competition leading to higher motivation and eventually higher sales. It also helps you identify the underperforming employees, and with a faster feedback loop, you can take corrective measures before it is too late.
There are several sales leaderboard software available in the market today. You can even integrate them with your CRM software to sync the data instead of manually updating the two systems.
Usually, the sales department comprises several teams, such as regional sales teams, inside sales and outside (field) sales teams, pre-sales teams, account managers, etc. All these teams have different tasks and performance metrics. When your goal is to encourage every team member and not just the top performers, you must set individual targets for reps in the leaderboard to help them compete with their previous selves. So, to create the leaderboard for a diverse team, insights/performance updates from your sales CRM software can help.
Benefits of Sales Leaderboard
The ultimate benefit of using a sales leaderboard is creating healthy competition among the sales teams. However, there are many more advantages to using a leaderboard. The following are the visible ones.
1. Improved Job Satisfaction
At some point, even the best of the best sales reps will burn out. Increasing pressure and decreasing job satisfaction is the main reason behind it. It often leads to a high turnover rate among salespeople. For instance, the annual turnover runs as high as 27% among salespeople in the United States. However, this is not a good sign for an organization.
Good sales reps mean good results for the business. Therefore, an organization must do everything to retain the top sales talent. Using leaderboard, you can increase employee engagement. Also, with employees having a way to track their progress, they become more satisfied with their jobs. As a result, they become more loyal to your business, take pride in their work, and tend to remain with your organization for a longer time.
2. Improved Performance
Businesses face losses when their employees are underperforming. Moreover, their bad performance also affects the rest of the team members – resulting in further expense for the business.
Therefore, organizations need to formulate strategies that can motivate employees to perform – without creating extra pressure.
A simple solution to this challenge is investing in gamified experiences for internal teams. Through gamification in leaderboards, sales reps can compare their weekly performances with each other in a playful mode. Such a competitive environment results in a positive influence on their performance. Thus, pushing them to perform better than themselves and anyone else in the organization.
3. Track Results Efficiently
Sales managers can only track individual results during annual evaluation. But it is equally important to track team results. With a leaderboard, it is possible to monitor individual’s and team’s performances efficiently. Moreover, sales managers can do so in real-time. They can also compare between sales reps and different teams.
That said, sales managers can also identify the top performers for a given period. Thus, allowing them to make informed decisions regarding promotions. All of this helps the business in the long term.
4. Gamification Energizes Sales Representatives
Of course, the field of sales is dynamic. Yet, it involves performing repetitive tasks. The monotonous nature of the job can make even the best sales performers weary.
Gamified leaderboards can help overcome such challenges. It can energize your sales reps. Gamification introduces new mechanics into the routine process and alerts everyone in the sales team.
It creates an excitement that can make salespeople do even the most mundane tasks with a lot of enthusiasm. Moreover, if you can add badges and tiers, then even better. It is because rewards are the biggest motivators for humans to perform better at their jobs.
5. Lesser Stress at Workplace
Using a leaderboard promotes healthy competition. Of course, this will lead to improved performance. But it will also result in lesser stress among employees in the workplace. Colleagues who are competing in a relaxed environment eliminates the chances of sick day in the workplace. Thus, leading to more productivity for the business.
Additionally, workplace stress costs companies in the United States $300 billion annually. Therefore, companies should find every possible way to reduce stress in the workplace. And using a leaderboard is one way to do it.
Final Thoughts
A growing number of businesses are adopting sales leaderboard to enhance productivity and improve job satisfaction. There are several indirect benefits to it as well. By just keeping the motivation levels up, it can bring more revenues for your business.
The leaderboard also helps the manager in evaluating the performance of sales representatives. The ability to compare different sales reps at once allows them to make an informed decision.
However, include sales leaderboard into your process only after building a positive environment in the workplace. In a highly competitive and hostile environment, it may have the reverse impact on salespeople. That is, if not incorporated strategically, leaderboards might demotivate people.
To get the most of your teams’ performances, make sure empathy and respect are intact. While analyzing the individuals who are not performing well, try to assess what went wrong. For instance, are the leads they are dealing with not good enough? Are they not equipped with information/tools? Or do they lack sales training?
Understanding these operational metrics will help you build a healthy work environment and leaderboards will add a fun-factor to it.
FAQs
The popular tools for sales performance control are CRM software, sales planning & forecasting tools, leaderboards, incentive compensation management tools, and field sales apps. Depending on your business and the performance metrics you wish to track, you can choose the appropriate tools.
High performing sales reps say that being able to perform sales tasks on their mobile phones is critical to their success. So, to enhance your salespeople’s performances, equip them with sales productivity tools such as a mobile CRM app. Also, automate their repetitive tasks, and encourage them through leaderboards, rewards/incentives, and monitor operational gaps in real-time and provide resolutions instantly.
