The Follow Up
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The Right Way To Make Sales Leaderboards

The Right Way To Make Sales Leaderboards

The right and wrong way to set up a sales leaderboard

Good Morning! Yesterday the Fed announced it would cut interest rates by half a percent, bringing rates down from 5.25-5.5% to 4.75-5%, which could be good news for us salespeople. Historically, as interest rates go down, people and companies tend to buy more. Because when money’s cheaper to borrow, companies are more likely to spend it. And like always, we’ll be there. Ready to sell. 😄

In today’s Follow Up:

A deep dive on sales leaderboards 👀
Responding to ‘your price is high‘ 🗣️
The ‘energy’ guy on the sales team ☕️
Sales jobs, LinkedIn & a meme 😂

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Sales Leaderboards: Are They Good for Your Team?

A little healthy competition never hurt anybody…

In fact, it’s one of the best ways to boost performance in almost all parts of life.

I mean… who wants to be a loser, right?

Sales teams traditionally use leaderboards to show sales reps how they are performing against their peers and where they rank on the team.

And in theory, they should be effective. Leaderboards create competition on the team, and no one wants to be the loser sitting in dead last.

But with an environment that pins sales reps against each other, and puts a score on everyone’s head, could a leaderboard actually hurt the performance of a sales team? And does the information you include on a leaderboard make a difference? Well, a new study tried to figure this out.

The study looked at 27,000 salespeople from more than 170 companies across 83 countries, and wanted to answer 3 questions:

Do sales leaderboards motivate salespeople and improve performance?
Does the type of information on the leaderboard matter?
Do leaderboards affect turnover on a sales team?

Here’s what they found:

Anonymous Leaderboards

When sales teams put up a leaderboard but made it anonymous, it motivated the sales reps to hit quota. However, it also leads to higher turnover on the team.

And when a sales rep leaves, it costs companies a lot of money to hire a new one.

Names on the Leaderboard

When sales teams included the names of reps on the leaderboard, it not only increased quota attainment… it also reduced team turnover.

It turns out that sales reps want to know exactly how well everyone else is doing in comparison to them. And because their numbers are public knowledge, they feel extra motivated to improve them to look good to others.

Putting Quota’s on the Leaderboard

The study found that sales performance was the worst when quotas were added to the leaderboard with the rep’s name and numbers.

It turns out, reps want everyone to know how well they’re doing, just not how well they’re doing in comparison to their quota.

The TLDR….

Yes, leaderboards do in fact work.

Salespeople are competitive by nature and want to see where they stand against their peers (so they can try to beat them).
Even though sales leaderboards are great, the information you include matters.
Don’t keep it anonymous, and don’t include quota. Reps want to see how well each person is doing, but they don’t want you to know their quota.

Fun fact: US companies spend an estimated $3.6 Billion on sales performance management tools every year, and that number is expected to increase to $6.4 billion by 2030. That’s a whole lotta commission.

Do you have a public sales leaderboard on your team?

New PandaDoc CPQ for HubSpot: Maximize Your Sales Potential and Improve Customer Satisfaction

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Sales Tip of The Day 💡

When you’re faced with a ‘too high’ pricing objection, dig deeper.

🔴 Your pricing seems high.
🟢 Thank you for letting me know. Could you tell me more about why you think that?

When you understand why they think the pricing is high, you uncover the real issue.

Is the perceived value too low? Are they looking at a cheaper competitor? Do they not have budget? etc. Find out what makes them think the price feels high.

Sales Around The Web 🗞️

🛎️ Servicebell is rebranding to “Rep.ai” and raised $7.5M to create lifelike AI avatars that can talk with website visitors in real-time video and audio.

🛠️ The Harvard Business Review looked at how your sales team can catch up on AI tools.

🚗 A car salesperson plead guilty to keeping customer records and selling the data to a competitor.

✍️ Do sales teams have an ‘energy guy’ that sets the energy for the office?