Do your sales leaderboards live on spreadsheets, whiteboards, salesforce.com reports or something entirely different? I don’t even know why I asked. The medium doesn’t matter as much as what you do with it.
After all, getting any type of sales leaderboard to motivate your team to the max requires a certain amount of technique. Here are two simple best practices that will sharpen yours.
1. Get Personal.
Anything you can do with a leaderboard to make it more personalized will improve its impact. Common approaches include featuring photos of participants’ faces or assigning specific icons to represent them in the competition.
Bringing human elements like these to the game will help each individual identify with what they see on the leaderboard. This increases the chances that they’ll associate visible rankings with themselves, not just some computer.
Not sure where to start adding that personal touch? Consider these:
- Highlight individual rankings with the colors of the college each participant attended.
- Replace standard names with workplace nicknames or those of favorite celebrities.
- Tip: Don’t have workplace nicknames? Make some up for the contest, and keep them light. In fact, sometimes cheesy is better – it’ll just make the contest more fun. (Biz Dev Ninja, perhaps?)
- Assign each team member an icon of their favorite activity/hobby that will always accompany their name in standings. (Ex: A pizza icon for the foodies, a hockey stick for the NHL super fan…you get the point.)
2. Get Communicative.
Layer on communication platforms, like Salesforce Chatter (a social media platform within Salesforce), or even a private Facebook group. Simply create a group or page around the contest, and then spark some conversation so that participants will engage with peers and leaders in the context of competition.
Get people talking (or posting, rather) by asking questions like:
- “Nice movement yesterday! How’d you pull that one off?”
- “I noticed that you moved the opportunity forward with Company X. How did that go?”
- “Are you all really going to let [insert winning sales rep’s cheesy workplace nickname] win this whole thing?”
Not only will such posts offer high performers recognition, but if you get the right conversations going, they will also let others see how the top performers made their way atop the leaderboard. Plus, your comments show the team that you, their leader, is paying attention. Before you know it, that social media channel will be producing best practice-related collaboration, contest engagement and team recognition.
It goes without saying that all sorts of additional best practices can take your sales leaderboards to even higher levels in terms of the motivation they produce. If you want to learn some more of those best practices, give our “Sales Leaderboard: Types and Tips” eBook a quick read. Just don’t wait to get started with the two simple steps shared here. We promise they’ll make a difference.
