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The recently published 2019 State of Sales Survey found that 32% of sales reps are most motivated by visibility into numbers. Data is definitely the craze right now. Knowing just how to leverage it to drive different results can be a challenge, but utilizing the right visibility and coaching strategies can help you use your data to drive real results.
While visibility helps keep reps motivated, sales coaching reinforces results and allows leadership to quickly address issues or make changes for continuous improvement. Leading sales teams know that a holistic approach makes for big wins. Coaching reps, managing KPIs, and hitting sales targets are all essential pieces of building an elite sales team.
Here's how you can better incorporate your sales leaderboards into your strategy to ensure the TVs are helping you to engage your team, serve your coaching efforts, drive quota attainment, recognize your team in rewarding ways, and amp up energy to create a world-class sales team.
1. Include percent-to-target slides
Leaderboards can show more than absolute values and totals. Including percent-to-target leaderboards is a great way to showcase the end goal and progress toward it. Viewing quota in the percent-to-target format can take advantage of the psychology studies that show visualization of the end goal actually increases total attainment.
Plus being able to clearly see how everyone is progressing toward targets allows you to coach your team toward goals affectively. You can watch in real time as the numbers change and step in to help if things aren't progressing as they should be.
2. Add metric slides
Metric slides are the newest TV-slide type that our product team just released. The metric slide can showcase up to 3 metrics on one slide and uses color coded progress bars to provide visibility into whether or not you're on track to beat the previous week, month, or time frame of your selection. (It even provides a little NBA-Jam flare when you surpass your previous numbers.)
This slide is perfect for showing metrics and efficiency in one place. Consider adding call connects, meetings set, and connects-to-meetings ratio together to get a feel for the who's actually achieving results. (Remember: just calls to meetings isn’t actually the best way to track meeting ratios — you've got to factor in connects!)
3. Showcase activity
Organizing all of your sales activities into scorecards and individual metrics becomes extremely powerful when you present and rank those metrics on the big screen. The great thing about showcasing activity score slides is that activity score levels the playing field. It shows who's putting in the most hustle regardless of varying roles, experience, etc. Employees who are ramped (and seasoned veterans) will likely have different targets, but activity score shows who is meeting their targets specific to them. Once you see who's putting in the effort with activity, but still not meeting results, you know exactly who could benefit from a little bit of coaching.
If your reps look light on activity for a certain time of day, as their coach, you’ll be able to see it alongside of all of them and be able to launch a quick competition or rally a quick team meeting to help refocus around the activities that matter most. Short duration competitions work great for this. Things like the person to hit the most dials in the next 30 minutes, gets Starbucks on me. But you have to watch out for the Cobra effect here!
4. Recognize more than closed deals
Using triggers to fire alerts to the TV (or even Slack!) when meetings are booked, opportunities are created, and other smaller wins—in addition to the usual closed deals—fuels your team. Recognition is a top motivator (even more than cash!) among the millennial workforce, and celebrating these smaller wins that lead to the bigger wins of deals closed will motivate more of your team. You can manage the activities and objectives more than results, and one way to do that is by recognizing the objectives.
It helps with coaching initiatives too. Part of your job as a coach is to recognize and praise wins when you see them. That's easier when your sales leaderboards automatically get interrupted with exciting news—like a deal getting closed. When alerts are firing off automatically with real-time information, everyone stays tuned in to the latest updates. Give a real-time shout out or high five when you have a rep book a meeting or close a deal and the news gets blasted to the TVs. Giving those shout outs in real time keeps the sales floor energy up and motivates the rest of the team to hunt for their wins too.
5. Include Leaderboards in Coaching Sessions
32% of reps said they're motivated by visibility into numbers. The more visibility we give our reps, the better — but visibility doesn’t just mean seeing who's in first place. Coaches should be sharing how reps who aren’t making it to the leaderboards can get there. Leaderboard metrics like "% of won demos" is a perfect example. This metric is one that can be coached around when someone is converting on average with the rest of the team.
Look at reps who are lagging in the efficiency metric leaderboards and coach them around the hard tactics to improve. Are they booking with the right ICP? Are they steamrolling objections? Are they offering the right resources, case studies or social proof? Offer some things they can do on the demos that will increase their chances of improving their win rates.
6. Leverage Team Accountability
When you measure performance of the collective team, reps will feel accountable to their peers. It's a motivation tactic that coaches can leverage by increasing the visibility of overall team performance.
When your team beats historical performance or reaches a threshold, celebrate with a team lunch or other team building exercise. When your team is aligned and you build a team centric culture, you will really find that a rising tide raises all ships.
7. Know (and Celebrate) When Meetings Are Booked
Most coaches spend part of their 1:1 sessions doing a pipeline review. When you get notified in real time on your TVs (or in Slack) about who's being booked as meetings or opportunities, you won’t have to waste time digging through lists or reports to find the deals that stand out or that you wish you'd known about sooner.
Make time to congratulate your rep for the meeting booked and make a note in your rep’s coaching file to discuss this deal in your upcoming session if it is a big one!
8. Communicate Effectively Throughout Your Organization
If your biggest number is buried in inbox or living on a dashboard you have to manually refresh, your team isn’t going to experience the value of visible goals. It has been reported that visible goals lead to 33% more attainment than if they are out of sight- out of mind. In addition to all of the individual leaderboard metrics your reps care about, make sure you are sharing how they all work together to produce team, department, or company wide rates.
Make sure that top-down alignment is happening by measuring and sharing the numbers that your high-level execs care about. Proactively sharing the big numbers is a way to help your reps stay focused on the end goal and understand how their activities, objectives, and effectiveness metrics stack up to the big number.
