Here at Atrium, we obviously believe in making sales metrics available and accessible. A clear understanding of the drivers of sales outcomes, and how a rep is performing against those drivers, is key to productive coaching conversations. We have default dashboards set up in the software and encourage you to customize those or create your own, to ensure that dashboards are tailored to the metrics that matter the most for your team and your sales motion.
We also talk a lot about operational cadences - using metrics in your 1:1s, team meetings, performance reviews, and QBRs. That's because a dashboard by itself isn't enough. This isn't Field of Dreams ("if you build it; they will come"). Building the dashboard doesn't create value unless you're using the insights you glean from it to take action in your sales organization. The same is true of leaderboards.
When you put a leaderboard up on a big screen by the sales floor but don't talk about the data on it and incorporate those conversations into your operational cadences, you risk that leaderboard becoming digital wallpaper. However, if you've incorporated data into your meetings, and you regularly talk about metrics with your reps, the leaderboard instead becomes another reinforcer that is highlighting the importance of those metrics in a visible way.
Having leaderboards reinforce a broader data-driven management approach is the most important "best practice" when it comes to implementing leaderboards, but there are others that will help maximize the impact of displaying information on screens around the sales floor:
- Display the most important metrics for success.
The most important metrics should be customized for the sales team and sales motion. This means that the metrics displayed for an SDR team will be different from an AE team, and the metrics displayed for an SMB AE team may be different from an Enterprise AE team. If you have broad agreement in your organization about the most impactful metrics you're tracking, those are the ones that you want up on your leaderboards. In this case, the entire team will understand why those metrics are the most important ones for them, and their repetition across meetings and dashboards and the team leaderboard will drive home their importance. - Show both input and output metrics.
Put another way, make sure that those important metrics include both leading and lagging indicators. There are a few reasons for this. You want to ensure that you're looking ahead to which reps are likely to be successful in the future and not only those who have been successful in the past. You also want to ensure that some of the metrics displayed are in the reps' control without the time lag of displaying bookings. If a rep who's struggling is working hard to turn things around, you want that to show up somewhere on your leaderboard so that rep doesn't get discouraged because the rest of the sales team is only seeing his past performance. - Include goals or benchmarks.
For most, if not all, of the metrics you're displaying on your leaderboard, you will have specific goals that you expect reps to reach in order to set themselves up for success in reaching their quota. Show those goals! In this way, you can celebrate all of the reps who exceeded their goals, not just the single individual at the top of the stack ranking, and give those reps who are below the goal a benchmark that they can reach rather than making it only about what the "best" person is doing. - Celebrate team performance.
Where there are specific team goals you're driving towards, another way to motivate reps who may not appear at the top of the stack ranking is to show the team's total progress to a team goal that they can contribute to and thus share in the success of the team.
If you want to get started setting up leaderboards for your organization using Atrium, then check out TV mode and let your Success Manager know if you have any questions!