Competitors love to be recognized for their success and hate it when they miss their goals. Sales is one of the purest forms of competition. There’s no judging panel that gives you points for wearing a nice suit. You are judged on one thing, hitting your sales goals.
Sure, we award points for effort and activity for new hires, but after the on-boarding period is up, it’s the numbers that count.
Announcing the sales numbers on a consistent basis lets everyone know where they stand. Top producers perineally rank towards the top and usually pick up their game if their ranking slips.
Those listed at the bottom know, without anyone needing to tell them, that they need to pick up the pace or changes will be coming.
Using stack rankings lets everyone on the sales team know where they are in the hierarchy of performance. And it informs employees that work in other areas of the company who is making an impact to the success of the company.
We can use a combination of rankings if we want to spread some of the praise among the team. If we know that certain activities will lead to future sales success, then adding rankings for most demos given or highest number of cold calls made, can be beneficial to the moral of the team.
But these rankings should be treated as less important than the sales numbers. This isn’t Little League Baseball or kids soccer. We don’t give participation awards.
In our profession, there are clear winners. Let’s give them the acknowledgment they deserve.
Editor’s note: this is a guest post from sales leader Nelson Greenwood. Nelson is a seasoned entrepreneur and SaaS Sales Leader, having run several multi-million dollar software companies over the past 30 years, most recently VP Sales at Digital Map Products.