Introduction
Sales leaderboards are increasingly being adopted by organizations across industries. They help in tracking each sales team’s and individual performance vis-à-vis their peers, and other team members.
Instead of having to rely on end-of-quarterly reports, leaderboards can provide leaders with a real-time view of the team, reward and incentivize the high performers and help the ones that are lagging.
Let’s look at why organizations need a sales leaderboard, and how to create effective sales leaderboards to improve a team’s productivity.
What is a Sales Leaderboard?
Sales Leaderboard is a software that shows how each rep has performed with respect to the stated business goals. It tracks the sales team’s metrics and displays the overall performance of the sales team on the leaderboard.
It is a great tool for any sales-driven organization to enhance engagement, improve productivity and make the workplace fun.
Sales leaderboard software are typically customizable. Depending on the sales goal, you can choose different metrics and the results will be displayed accordingly.
Why should sales leaders use a sales leaderboard software?
Sales leaderboards inculcate healthy competition among the sales team, create a sense of achievement, and improve the productivity of the team members.
Using sales leaderboards has several advantages for sales teams:
More transparency
Sales leaderboard adds transparency in the workplace. It displays the names of all the reps, and the targets they have achieved.
This way the leaderboard increases the desire in reps to climb the sales ladder.
Enhanced employee engagement
As per research by Gallup Management Journal, 54% of employees are not engaged in their jobs and only 29% of employees are actively engaged. Your employees' engagement in the job makes them perform better in the workplace.
The sales leaderboard engages the employees by showing their performance on board. For example, Sales leaders can showcase whose performance has improved during a certain period than just showing the top performer.
Real-Time Feedback
You can connect your sales leaderboard to a CRM and track the team’s activity in real-time allowing to identify the sales reps performance, provide feedback and coaching to help them improve their win rates.
A better approach to team development
Coaching sales reps to achieve their target is one of the important tasks for a sales leader. The sales leaderboard helps one understand where a sales rep is stuck and where they need guidance.
Sales leaderboards offer a visual representation of every sales rep’s performance that helps leaders identify gaps and help them with to-the-point coaching.
Make workspace fun with gamification
Sales, though a dynamic process, involves a lot of repetitive tasks like cold calling and email sequences.
Using a leaderboard helps improve team performance by gamifying the work experience, and motivates the team to improve their performance.
Enhance job satisfaction
Rewarding top sales reps every month for their contribution encourages other sales team members to perform better. At the same time, appreciation and rewards bring the feeling of satisfaction.
This leads to increase job satisfaction, lowers attrition, and helps in creating a happier workspace.
Track Results Efficiently
Sales leaderboard helps you track an individual’s or even sales team’s performance daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. You can then compare it with other individuals and teams and see the progress. You can identify the top-performing team and sales representative and incentivize them accordingly.
How to create a sales leaderboard?
Here are steps you can follow to build your sales leaderboard.
- Login to your CRM and create a report of the metrics you want to track on your sales leaderboard such as demo calls, emails sent, deals closed, and others.
- Create an excel sheet to track daily, monthly, or quarterly your sales teams/members for the KPIs you selected.
- Using both CRM and excel sheets, create data visualization showing sales metrics against business goals.
- Present it to your team.
What are the key metrics to include in the sales leaderboard and how to measure them?
Sales leaderboards can work best only if the right metrics are tracked.
By tracking the appropriate metrics, one can instill a competitive spirit in the sales team.
You can use the following metrics to get the best out of your sales leaderboard tool:
New Monthly Recurring Revenue(MRR) vs Expansion Monthly Recurring Revenue
New monthly recurring revenue metrics show monthly generated revenue by acquiring new customers.
The formula to calculate the average New MRR is -
New MMR = New customers x MRR per customer
Expansion of monthly recurring revenue is when more revenue is generated from the same set of customers through upselling, cross-selling, add–ons, etc.
The formula to calculate average expansion MRR is -
Expansion MMR = [(Expansion MRR at Month’s end - Expansion MRR at Month’s starting) / Expansion MRR at Month’s starting] x 100
From the above calculation, one can understand how much time and money it takes to get a new client vs building a return customer relationship.
As per Bain & Company, acquiring a new customer costs 6 to 7 times more than retaining an existing one.
You can check how sales reps maintain customer relationships by checking expansion MMR.
Closed-Won Opportunity
This metric shows the number of ‘Closed-Won’ sales opportunities. It shows how successful a sales team’s efforts were in a particular period. Closed-won means when a proposal has been accepted and signed
You can segment won opportunity counts based on region, rep name or source, etc.
If your analysis shows that reps having a high rate of closed-won opportunities multi-thread their conversations, and send an average of 4 emails more than others in the team, you can encourage everyone in the team to send in more emails, and multi-thread their conversations to improve their chances of winning more deals.
New Logos
New logos metric on the sales leaderboard displays how many new businesses account your sales reps have acquired.
Pipeline Creation
Sales pipeline creation helps you track where a deal is stalled and what sales activity your sales reps should do to close the deal. Breaking down sales leads into different pipeline stages helps you track how much time a rep takes to move a lead from one stage to the next and where they need help in improving their performance.
Average opportunity size
This metric shows an average value of an opportunity that was open or closed at a particular time. You can see what is the opportunity size a particular sales rep was holding during a period.
If they were able to close the deal or if it is still open, you can then guide them to improve closures.
Average opportunity age
It is the number of calendar days from the time an opportunity is created and the current day. You can further segment and see how many days an opportunity stays in one sales stage. You can check this for each of your sales reps also.
You can see how many days a rep takes to close one deal, and the number of days it takes to move the lead from one stage to another.
Final Thoughts
Sales teams are increasingly using leaderboard software to track, assist and improve team performance. While sales leaderboards help teams identify the top performers and those struggling, it is important to ensure that the reps who are underperforming aren't looked down, and the sales leader must lead with empathy, motivate them and create a healthy work environment.
