Nothing like competitiveness can boost the employees to work productively. Particularly, the sales team needs extra motivation to meet their targets. How to boost employees to produce quality output? Leaderboards. It is enough rather than any other complex games.
Leaderboard design companies better know this aspect and come up with engaging designs. Trust that no one wishes to be the last, however dull their job is. You can check out a list of these companies right here.
Here are some ways to justify how leaderboards work like a charm to improve your business agility.
Improves your focus on goal setting
Every leaderboard communicates the default goal to “Rank number one.” Its design appeals to your team members to get the highest score on the board.
The implementation of this competitiveness is underrated yet successful companies never fail to do. Businesses like Nike provide fitness activity points to motivate their customers to concentrate on fitness.
You can use similar techniques with your employees as well. There are certain rules in including the leaderboards to your employees.
- Your goal should support their psychological needs.
- Define the “why” behind the goal.
- It shouldn’t empathize with the pride, meaningless incentives, and the uncontrollable urge to WIN; instead, try to focus on personal satisfaction, social identity, fun, and enjoyment.
This way, you can clearly define the quarterly, half-yearly, and annual goals. When you set a clear goal, the target becomes realistic, motivating your employees to focus on the bull’s eye target.
Transparency
Having leaderboards at unseen locations fails your attempt to motivate the workers. Be transparent. When you publicly place the leaderboards, it instantly showcases who’s hitting the goals and exceeding their quotas. Leaderboard design companies structure-specific boards for sales, manufacturing, or any other team according to the needs. With these leaderboards’ visibility, you can even stay up-to-date, analyzing the sales’ progress, resulting in better synergy among teams.
Interestingly, it encourages the low and average performers to step up their game in their business. Some companies integrate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with leaderboard software. Even some use the obvious approach: display on office TVs. It works perfectly and makes the employees have their eyes on the prize.
Boost morale
Even though sales are a happening team in a business, it is a stressful job. People in this team get easily burned out if they didn’t meet their monthly and quarterly targets. Therefore a small spark of joy like “Deals are closed” in the leaderboards or someone in the team meets their “quota” can go a long way in cheering them up every day. The key is to create engaging leaderboards.
Leaderboard design companies mainly focus on building a design that displays only the top performers instead of the entire list. This way, the poor performers won’t feel discouraged or humiliated at all. Remember, your motive is to encourage the top performers and not suppress the underperforming candidates.
Enhanced productivity
Obviously, when motivation and encouragement are pumped up, it inspires them to work productively. When approaching the leaderboard design companies to formulate a leaderboard for your team, you need to be specific about the metrics. For example, quarter targets like the number of deals and the company’s money seem good. However, it’s not an effective formula to boost productivity.
Everyone in the team has unique skills. Appreciate their exceptional talent too. If you simplify the metrics, it would be easier for the employees to improve their performance. Companies like SweetRush focus on 19 varieties of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like average conversion time, sales per rep, customer lifetime value, and much more in their leaderboard designs. Remember the numbers matter only if it brings up consistent improvement in your team.
Healthy competition among teams
Where there is competition, there are misunderstandings and clashes. To avoid rivalry among the team, choose the right metrics, appreciate the reps for prospecting activities and treat everyone in the team as one. Meaningless metrics, like the number of Facebook friends, don’t make any sense in sales.
There is a thin line between ranking the performers based on what they do and who they are. Manage to find the mid-ground when dealing with competition. Explain to your team members the ultimate purpose of leaderboards. This will clarify the intention of a leaderboard for healthy competition.
Combat the potential problems
Needless to say, in the urge to win, some employees use sneaky measures to be on the top of the leaderboard. Such cheating is unacceptable. These leaderboards might disappoint users as it represents a mere scale of time spent on a certain activity. For instance, it’s quite common when you notice a negative review of the product on an online shopping site. While behind the scene, sometimes such reviews are fake to rank at the top of the board.
It also increasingly occurs in fitness trackers, where just a fake hand movement or wiggling a few times are marked as an achievement. Even Though these fooling systems might give a temporary addiction to the users, it might not help in the long run. As a side effect of these malpractices, it affects the sincere strugglers immensely. Keeping all of these in mind, try to create a foolproof system where the employees have no way to cheat. Also, as mentioned earlier, your metrics or factors determine who is in the top matters the most in leaderboards.
The Bottom line
Leaderboards, despite its pros and cons, have the main theme behind it- competitiveness. How you leverage that spirit decides your system is a success or failure. Everyone has at least a tad bit of a competing mindset. By channelising them in the right direction, you can persuade them to be active and not counterproductive. There are numerous leaderboard design companies present in the market. It is as much as it is equally important to decide the options in the leaderboard and the company that offers the best. Have you implemented a leaderboard for your team? How was your experience? Please, share with us in the comments. Happy Competing!
