How to Use Sales Leaderboards in Salesforce to Inspire Competition and Collaboration

There has been a lot of talk about using gamification to enhance sales performance. And sure, giving badges to salespeople who meet goals can potentially motivate them to succeed. But at the end of the day, salespeople really just want to hit their numbers, keep their jobs and be duly compensated for their efforts. You don’t need to make their job seem more like a game of Call of Duty in order to have a successful sales team. The right sales leaderboard can give your reps the fuel to not only push themselves to succeed, but also collaborate to hit team goals.

Why Competition Should Coincide with Collaboration

In Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street, tycoon Gordon Gecko (portrayed by Michael Douglas) infamously states that “greed is good.” That’s great advice for an investment banker, but not for salespeople. The best ones as ambitious and competitive, but not “greedy.”

Competitiveness and the will to win are some of the most important predeterminers of sales success. However, the salespeople I see rising in their companies, buying nice houses and trading in their Toyotas for Teslas are the ones who not only hit their personal numbers, but also help teammates crush their quotas.

Want to inspire competition and collaboration in your company without having to make your team feel like they’re playing an X-Box? Here are a few tips on how to build the ultimate sales leaderboard dashboard in Salesforce.

Reps Should Be Able to Compare Their Performance to Peers

Sales metrics aren’t just for managers. Salespeople should always have a real-time view of not only how they’re performing, but also how their performance is stacking up against that of their co-workers. This is vital for two reasons. First of all, it can bolster a competitive environment, inspiring reps to want to close the most deals. Also, it enables sales managers (and reps who are true leaders) to offer assistance to reps that are falling behind. In my opinion, the ideal sales culture is one where the top sales reps are highly competitive with other A-players, but will go out of their way to help new hires or reps that are struggling to keep their heads above water.

Track Opportunity Revenue by SDR

If your company has your sales team divided into sales development reps (SDRs), that prospect, and account executives (closers), then I highly recommend that you add your SDRs to your leaderboard as well. The most vital metric for measuring SDRs’ performance is opportunity revenue by SDR. This shows which SDRs are sourcing the best opportunities. Making your SDRs’ opportunity revenue transparent inspires them to compete for top opportunities and collaborate with account executives to close those deals. I always think that SDRs should have some sort of stake in the outcome of their efforts, and recommend adjusting their compensation plans to include commission based on won deals so that they are not only going for quantity but also quality when hunting for opportunities.

Use Leaderboards to Bolster Your Team’s Overall Success

One metric that I like for leaderboards is which reps are at or above 90% of their goals. You can establish benchmarks for where reps should be at given times of the month or year. Then, see how many reps are at or near those goals. If you only have a couple reps who are near their goal and a lot more that are falling short, you know you have a big problem on your hands. However, this doesn’t always indicate that you have bad reps on your team. Perhaps your top performing reps are working with better SDRs. Maybe leads aren’t being distributed equally. Or maybe you do only have a couple A-players, in which case you need to “diversify your portfolio” or be vulnerable if one of those reps leaves. You can also use this metric to inspire collaboration by offering incentives to the entire team if everyone falls within 90% of quota. To find out, you’ll have to put on your sleuthing hat and dig into a variety of other metrics that we cover in our latest eBook, 7 Essential Salesforce Dashboards for Predicting and Influencing Inside Sales Success.

Want to learn more about using Salesforce dashboards to drive success? Our latest eBook helps you discover which metrics are most vital to your business drivers.