35% More Sales Appointments, Thanks to March Madness

March Madness takes off tomorrow. Have you thought about ways you could leverage that to increase sales productivity?

The leadership team at NetTel Partners has. They’ll host an internal March Madness-themed competition, to fire up their team around getting more sales appointments. NetTel has done this for the past four tournaments, and March has become their most productive time of the year as a result.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Dennis Nishi recently covered NetTel’s annual sales tournament in a piece called “Make March Madness Work for You.” Here’s an excerpt:

While watching the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Championship four years ago, NetTel Partners founder Dan Ceravolo came up with a friendly March Madness competition that would goose sales at his Philadelphia telemarketing company.

NetTel makes business-to-business sales calls on behalf of technology-company clients, so Mr. Ceravolo set up a system that awarded points for each successful sales appointment made. Total scores determined the order in which salespeople got to pick the best-ranked teams to seed their brackets (betting-pool diagrams that chart and predict who will win a tournament). 

Although the overall winner of the competition won $300 and a personalized basketball jersey displayed in the office, the bigger winner was NetTel, which saw a 35% spike in the number of appointments set over the course of the three-week tournament that helped the company boost income.

“It’s one thing that you can do to make a tough job calling out more interesting—by providing a lot of different stimulators,” says Mr. Ceravolo. “Although they’re working at twice the speed, it’s not like we could push them this way for the entire year. But everybody enjoys the championship and it’s great for business.”

The piece goes on to share additional ideas for companies to consider during March Madness, especially around minimizing productivity loss and leveraging the tournament for other positive business outcomes.