Looking for a creative way to motivate your sales team and improve performance? Just jump on the sales leaderboard bandwagon, which has been picking up a lot of steam lately.
Sales leaderboards will help you keep your reps accountable, boost their productivity levels, and most importantly, help them close more deals than they ever have before.
In this comprehensive article, we’ll teach you everything you need to know about sales leaderboards, from what they are to which apps you should use to set them up.
What is a Sales Leaderboard?
A sales leaderboard is a tool that your sales team can use to visualize sales performance.
You simply choose the KPIs you want to track, then let your leaderboard rank your reps based on their abilities to achieve their sales targets, and display the results for all to see.
Let’s pretend that you manage a small sales team and metrics like “number of leads contacted” and “lead to opportunity conversion rate” and “total revenue” are important to you.
So, you set up your sales leaderboard to track these three KPIs. In the first month Jack contacts 100 leads, Jill contacts 85, and Bob contacts 80. Jill doesn’t like “losing” to Jack, so she works extra hard in month two and contacts 120 leads, compared to Jack’s 110.
Bob, on the other hand, always lags behind in the “number of leads contacted” metric. But he outpaces his colleagues in the other two, earning higher conversion rates and driving more revenue for your company. Jack and Jill will need to catch up to him in these areas.
As you can see, sales leaderboards will make it easier to evaluate rep performance. They also create friendly competition within your sales team that pushes reps to achieve your business goals and more.
7 Best Sales Leaderboards
A sales team leaderboard will benefit your organization. The question is, which software should you use for this purpose? Here are the top seven options available to you:
SPOTIO Leaderboards
Best for: Field sales teams
G2 rating: 4.5 stars / 350 reviews
SPOTIO is the number one sales engagement platform for field sales teams, allowing users to easily generate leads, set appointments, communicate with prospects, automate tasks, run custom reports, and yes, build top-level sales leaderboards that motivate reps.
- Track any metric, including knocks, leads, meetings, opportunities, wins, and revenue
- Help your reps understand how they stack up against the other members of your team
- Send leaderboard notifications to each rep via the SPOTIO mobile and desktop apps
- Use leaderboards to run competitions, award prizes, and facilitate better performance
Ambition
Best for: Enterprise-level companies
G2 rating: 4.6 stars / 572 reviews
Ambition is a sales coaching platform designed for enterprise organizations. With it, users can access important sales performance metrics, build intuitive training programs, and even gamify the sales process with user-friendly leaderboards and recognition features.
- Track activity and objective metrics for each sales rep on your team
- Trigger alerts that fire off every time a rep reaches a major milestone
- Access leaderboards on a computer, mobile app, Slack, or Salesforce
- Integrate Ambition with Slack, Gong, Outreach, Salesloft, and Salesforce
Salesforce
Best for: Existing Salesforce users
G2 rating: 4.3 stars / 20,340 reviews
If you’re in sales, you’ve heard of Salesforce. This CRM is used by thousands upon thousands of organizations to improve their marketing, sales, and customer service workflows. Its leaderboards feature can be found in the “Salesforce Command Center” and used to display important sales metrics for up to 100 salespeople at one time.
- Quickly see and evaluate team performance over a given time period
- Track a variety of metrics that pertain to your unique sales department
- Integrate with SPOTIO to access all of the field sales tools in our platform
Zoho CRM
Best for: Budget-conscious sales teams
G2 rating: 4.1 stars / 2,645 reviews
Zoho CRM is another popular CRM option—especially for budget-conscious sales teams. Its “Motivator” feature gives users the ability to gamify the sales process, which often leads to improved performance. Top reps can even receive points and digital trophies for their efforts.
- Choose KPIs that affect team performance, then track them on a leaderboard
- View metrics on an easy-to-understand dashboard to help reps reach targets
- Award top performers with points, trophies, etc. inside the Zoho CRM platform
- Integrate with SPOTIO to access the many field sales tools in our solution
SalesCompete
Best for: Slack-oriented workflows
G2 rating: 4.9 stars / 11 reviews
If your sales team uses Slack, you might consider SalesComplete. This sales tool helps sales teams generate sales reports, build sales leaderboards, and receive real-time sales notifications—all inside their department’s pre-existing Slack channel.
- Build sales leaderboards directly inside your Slack account
- Track any activity metric, such as calls, emails, and meetings
- Include charts and graphs to illustrate your chosen KPIs
- Integrate SalesComplete with Outreach, HubSpot, or Salesloft
Spinify
Best for: Artificial intelligence
G2 rating: 4.5 stars / 672 reviews
Spinify combines AI-powered insights and gamification to create a unique employee engagement app. One of the platform’s key features is “Leaderboards” which sales managers can use to create friendly competition between reps and boost motivation levels.
- Track all of your sales team’s essential KPIs in one dashboard
- Allow reps to challenge each other in head-to-head competitions
- Create custom games to keep your reps interested and motivated
- Receive coaching tips to help your reps reach their full potential
LevelEleven
Best for: Coaching sales reps to success
G2 rating: 4.4 stars / 274 reviews
Finally, we have LevelEleven, an intuitive platform that sales managers can use to motivate, engage, and coach their reps. The “motivate” module includes leaderboards and other gamification features, which help encourage professional sellers to achieve more.
- Track any behavior, metric, or KPI for your sales team
- Create custom contests to incentive specific behaviors
- Display real-time leaderboards so reps know where they stand
- Integrate with Salesforce and motivate reps inside your CRM
Benefits of Sales Leaderboards
The tools above will help you create sales leaderboards. But you’re wondering, “Why do I need to do this? There are plenty of other ways to boost individual and team performance already.”
You’re right. But sales leaderboards have a few specific benefits.
Sales leaderboards motivate reps
Seventy-two percent of employees say that gamification tools, such as leaderboards, motivate reps to work harder.
This is important because harder-working reps make more visits and calls. They send more emails and texts, too. When these things happen, your company will close more deals.
Sales leaderboards promote accountability
Leaderboards motivate reps to take ownership of their sales careers. Afterall, no rep wants to rank last in key metrics.
To avoid this, most reps will attend training and put in extra hours. They do this to move higher in the standings. In other words, leaderboards promote accountability. Sales managers like you won’t have to push their reps so hard to meet targets.
Sales leaderboards boost productivity
Studies have shown that gamifying sales with tools such as leaderboards can increase productivity by a whopping 50%.
Reps that get more done almost always make more sales. It makes sense when you think about it. More visits, calls, emails, and so on give reps more chances to close.
Sales leaderboards accelerate sales performance
Motivated, accountable, and productive employees will only benefit your company if they produce more than their unmotivated, unaccountable, and unproductive counterparts.
Studies show that effective sales leaderboards can lead to a 45% bump in bottom line sales margin. That’s a massive improvement—and all you have to do is invest in one of the sales leaderboard apps above and use it to motivate your team!
How to Get the Most From Your Sales Leaderboard
You can’t buy leaderboard software and expect it to solve your problems. You need to use the tool the right way. With that in mind, here are nine sales leaderboard ideas for you to try.
Regularly update your leaderboard: Your sales leaderboard won’t motivate your team if it contains outdated information. Your reps need to see real-time data to mark their progress and compare their performance to their colleagues. It’s the only way to engage them. Luckily, the right leaderboard will automatically update standings when it receives new data.
Make the leaderboard visible to all team members: In a similar vein, your sales leaderboards need to be visible and accessible to your entire sales team. Performance visibility keeps individual and team goals top of mind for your reps. It can motivate employees to work harder. Why wouldn’t they? If they don’t put in peak effort, they’ll fall behind and look bad in front of their peers.
Aim to encourage healthy competition: Sales is a team sport, and a positive company culture is a worthy goal. But there’s nothing wrong with friendly competition. In fact, you should encourage competition between reps—as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. This will help you build a more fun workplace. It will also help the reps under your command achieve more. One of the easiest ways to create healthy competition is to use a leaderboard.
Celebrate achievements and successes: Your reps will want to work harder and close more deals when you invest in a sales leaderboard. But their fire will burn out if reps feel like their manager doesn’t appreciate their efforts. That’s why you need to celebrate the wins your team achieves. What can you award to top performers? What can you give to your entire team when group goals are accomplished? You need to come up with good answers.
Use leaderboards to identify training opportunities: Sales leaderboards will tell you what your reps do well and where they can improve. Some reps may kill it in activity-related KPIs, but lag behind in revenue-related metrics, for example. If so, you can train them to close more of the prospects they speak to, thus improving their revenue generation abilities.
Avoid negative competition and burnout: As mentioned above, healthy competition is a good thing. But if your reps begin competing against each other in toxic ways you’ll need to intervene. Negative competition will breed discord throughout your entire company. Look for burnout, too. You don’t want reps to work so hard one month that they crash the next.
Integrate leaderboards with other sales tools: Leaderboards are nice alone. But, they transform when they connect directly with your other sales tools. This is especially true for CRM software. Integrate your leaderboard and CRM. This way, your reps always have the latest performance data and can use it.
Provide incentives for top performers: What do high-performing sales reps get when they reach the top of your leaderboard? Bragging rights? A trophy? A cash prize? Extra PTO? The incentives you offer are completely up to you. Just make sure that you offer something.
Foster a culture of continuous improvement: Finally, make sure your reps know that you aren’t interested in one-time victories. You want to develop a sales department that strives for more progress. Always. Your sales leaderboards should inspire reps to work hard. They should also inspire them to improve their skills daily and monthly. If they do, your company will make more sales than ever.
Use Leaderboards to Motive Reps and Drive Performance
A good sales and leaderboard strategy will help you motivate your sales team. It will also make your reps more productive and help them achieve more for your organization.
But good sales leaderboards will also give you useful insights. You can use them to make better sales strategies and improve your sales coaching. When these things happen, your entire company will benefit because your team will regularly close more deals.
SPOTIO’s leaderboards feature was designed to give you the deep insights you need. Sign up for a free demo of your platform today to see if it’s the right tool for your sales team!
