How Glassdoor Re-Energized Their Sales Team To Beat Quotas
The following is an excerpt from The Predictable Revenue Guide To Tripling Your Sales:
Has your sales manager ever gotten a standing ovation? 
It’s more and more common to walk into a sales office these days, and see a bunch of bigscreen TVs around displaying live sales leaderboards. Sometimes they’re showing live monthly sales goals, sometimes live sales contests leaderboards.
Glassdoor is a free jobs & career community where employees post anonymous reviews of the companies where they work. Nick Boeka is a sales operations manager at Glassdoor. He wanted an easy way to better motivate and focus the sales team.
Nick found Hoopla, one of those apps that makes it easy to create contests and leaderboards to track and showcase rep performance on ESPN-like leaderboards on big screen TVs & computers around the office. Remote reps can view it all on their computers & mobile devices. Nick signed on with Hoopla, bought some HDTVs and had the application up and running the next day.
It integrates with Glassdoor’s salesforce.com system, streaming live sales updates as they happen straight from Salesforce to the TV screens. The televised challenges and leaderboards were an instant hit with the Glassdoor sales team.
“I’ve never gotten a standing ovation before, but that’s what happened when we did the live presentation of Hoopla to the sales team,” says Nick. Unlike the manual contests and updates Glassdoor used in the past, Boeka found that broadcasting sales updates with an app had a much more powerful and immediate effect on the team’s performance.
Live leaderboards & contests helped increase the team’s sense of urgency + sales system adoption shot up
But putting in live leaderboards did more for Glassdoor than add some extra initial excitement. It helped push the company’s sales performance to new levels. For example:
Urgency: Reps at Glassdoor went from hitting 85% of their goal of ‘appointments booked’ to hitting 125%. “Reps who’ve been here awhile, who may have been getting complacent, are sparked again. I’ve heard them yell things like “John, I’m coming for you!” says Nick. 100%
Engagement: The “fun / live / visible” format doubled engagement. For example, Nick ran a “March Madness”-themed contest to track appointments set. With the new system, 100% of the team participated, compared to 50% of the team in the past.
Performance: By focusing reps on key activities & goals, Glassdoor’s reps started consistently beating their quota; and even newly ramping reps achieve 80% of quota. “New reps immediately understand what they need to do to be successful, they can see it on the boards, which is very motivating,” Nick explains.
CRM Adoption: Nick says Salesforce user adoption shot up. Why? If a rep doesn’t keep her stats current in Salesforce, he/she’ll soon lose her position on the leaderboards. As a result, the team went from tracking 70% to 100% of its key metrics in Salesforce. (Whoa!)
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