How to Increase Sales Productivity with Transparent Reporting w/ Travis Truett [Episode 377]

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Joining me on this episode of Accelerate! is my guest Travis Truett, Co-Founder and CEO of Ambition, an enterprise-grade sales productivity platform.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Ambition is a sales productivity platform focused on employee experience and engagement.

There are more Millennials in the workforce than any other demographic, and they are more willing to leave a job. Companies who want to keep them will accommodate them.

Ambition connects your digital systems together, and allows a business team to tie KPIs around the data. You can track quotas, pipeline movement, activity metrics, and productivity metrics (such as the demo-to-opportunity ratio).

On top of KPI classes, there can be layered gamification scorecards, goals, competitions, analytics, leader boards, to drive motivation and recognition. This transparency is effective for employees and the managers coaching them.

Ambition is tailored to highlight what is important, and where an employee can improve, as opposed to just counting activities. Scorecards have customized daily activities, and weekly and quarterly objectives.

Based on the scorecard, there is a productivity quadrant where employees are mapped on a graph, input against output. This is transparency that enables specific coaching, and even suggests helpful changes to CRM metrics.

Ambition provides transparency, accountability, and the insights to have better conversations between manager and employee.

Ambition outbound targets sales organizations, as the intended market, but other types of organizations have been calling Ambition.

Using Ambition, Continuum has increased Salesforce utilization by 86%, because reps want their activities recorded, for the competition. When CRM is used, the data is analyzed.

To use a paradigm of candy, aspirin, and vitamins, Ambition’s TV Leader Board (recognition) is candy, fixing a pain point for an employee (transparency, how they are doing) is aspirin, and the Scorecard (areas for improvement) is vitamins.

Ambition takes training, but it helps change behaviors. Its objective is to improve the performance of the middle 70% that just need help, and want to do better. Employee retention is a benefit of Ambition through transparent real-time data.

Ambition measures sales productivity by measuring average rate of input divided by targeted output. The quadrant changes in the month as inputs and outputs are entered.