Blog > 27 January, 2022
Creating a sales leaderboard needn't be complicated or a lot of effort. We run through the things that matter.
Gamification is a topic that has been popular for some time now. The reason is that it works! In this article we'll take a look at
Gamification has been such a hit because most people are by nature competitive. They want to know how they compare to the rest of the pack. And sales people are more competitive than most. Their domain is heavily numbers-driven which means that it is well-suited to gamification.
Simply put: gamification is putting "game elements" in a non-game environment. Why? To increase motivation, competition and overall positive outcomes. There are many of these "game elements" which have been used to gamify various things or processes, including:
This list is probably a bit overwhelming, and you should certainly not start by introducing all (or even three) of these elements at once.
Instead, take baby-steps and start with a very simple gamification measure. Commit to it and then observe what happens.
The best place to start is creating a leaderboard for your sales team. Setting up a leaderboard is not hard, and you immediately have something tangible that you can present to the team. A lot of the other elements listed above require a more involved implementation such as user-logins, content creation and integration with existing systems.
If you discover that this one measure is capable of "moving the needle", you can then think about introducing more complex measures (and tools).
At the very least you will need one person to add data to the leaderboard (keep it up-to-date) as well as some channel/medium for showing the leaderboard. In the spirit of keeping things simple, we do not recommend allowing employees to add their own data or connecting up to an existing system. This is over-engineering!
The purpose of a leaderboard is to show who's best at a particular thing. It is a ranked list with the best person at the top and the worst at the bottom -- by the way, we recommend staying away from stigmatizing those at the bottom.
The most fundamental question to answer is what will you be tracking on the leaderboard? This will determine whether your experiment is successful or not.
The numbers or metrics that you track will be an individual decision, which depends heavily on your business and the structure of your team. Some ideas are:
Again, in the spirit of simplicity, use only one metric on your leaderboard. You can add more later, if required.
Your chosen metric should fulfil these essential criteria: 1. The metric should be measurable per sales rep. Team metrics (the aggregate performance of the team) also have their place, but not on a leaderboard where you are showing individual performance. 2. The sales reps should be capable of moving the metric. If he/she has little influence over it, it's a bad metric. 3. The metric should be easy to measure. If it takes 30 mins to extract the metrics from your data by hand, then people are not going to bother.
Obviously you need your employees to see the leaderboard for it to be effective. Most leaderboard tools will allow you to project the output onto a screen in your office as well as supplying you with a link for viewing the leaderboard privately.
Here are the tools we would recommend:
If you have questions or feedback, then do comment below. Thanks and good luck!