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Coaching sales reps, managing your KPIs, and hitting sales targets are essential pieces of building an elite sales team. Leading sales teams know that a holistic coaching mentality incorporates concepts like gamification and visibility to drive toward the win.
Here's how you can better incorporate your sales leaderboards into your coaching strategy to ensure the TVs are engaging your team and serving your coaching efforts (instead of becoming a clock on the wall).
1. Showcase Activity
Sales coaches must lay out the path to success for your reps. That means you've got to go beyond posting total deals or revenue closed on your sales TVs. Your sales reps need to know what activities to execute on in their day-to-day lives, and by broadcasting to a leaderboard, you're showing how important and critical to success those activities are. Organizing all of your sales activities into scorecards and individual metrics becomes extremely powerful when you present those as scores and rank those metrics on the big screen.
So we see it. Now what?
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!
2. Recognize wins in real time
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. This strategy makes it impossible for your TVs to get stale. When alerts are firing off automatically with real-time information, everyone stays tuned in to the latest updates.
So we see it. Now what?
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.
3. Coaching Sessions Should Include The Leaderboards
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.
So we see it. Now what?
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.
4. 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.
So we see it. Now what?
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.
5. Highlight Improvements
Coaching is 100% focused on getting better. Showcasing the improvements on leaderboards is a great way to recognize the work that's coming out of the coaching sessions and highlight new reps who may not be leading the charts against veterans in other efficiency metrics.
So we see it. Now what?
Show the ratio of improvements of metrics like connects to meetings set, emails sent to emails open or any sales effectiveness metric of your choice, then measure the overall lift of the ratio to show how coaching around the metric is working.
6. 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.
So we see it. Now what?
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!
7. 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.
So we see it. Now what?
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.
Curious to learn more about how you can incorporate leaderboards into your coaching strategy? Let’s talk!
