How Multi-Metric Competitions Impact the Sales Funnel

A Mini-Case Study from Ambition

A unique feature of Ambition is our implementation of multiple performance metrics into

our aggregate Ambition score. Unlike other sales productivity tools, the competitions

you run in Ambition center around composite performance, not individual metrics.

Why is that critical? Because, as any sales professional knows, there are a number of

different activities that go into the so-called sales funnel. Focus on just one activity, and

you only incentivize elite performance in a limited section of the funnel.

The goal with any sales team should be to incentivize overall performance, not just a

single, isolated activity, as Noah discussed in one of his recent posts. Likewise, the goal

with any sales productivity tool is to show rapid, continuous Return-on-Investment.

The following is a demonstration of how Ambition uses multi-metric competitions to

incentivize your entire sales process, and how a new Ambition customer saw head-

turning impact on ROI upon implementing one such competition.

How a Multi-Metric Competition Works

The goal of every sales rep is to close more quality deals, more efficiently, ultimately

generating a greater amount of revenue and thus personal commission.

To do that, a sales rep must perform well at every level of the sales funnel, which is why

Ambition's multi-metric sales competition incorporates metrics at the funnel's top,

bottom and middle sections.

Below is a sample illustration of multiple metrics that may go into a Sales Rep's

Ambition score. The Ambition score is ultimately determined by the Rep's ability to meet

the daily benchmarks his or her company sets for each metric.

Note that this example competition focuses around six metrics that span the Sales

Funnel:

● Prospecting: Outbound emails, open rate, reply rate

● Mid-Funnel: Web Demos

● Closing: Profit

● Aggregate: Pipeline

This is the typical setup of the Ambition Score, and showcases a best practice in

product use. The fundamental idea behind Ambition is to sales reps on composite

performance, rather than performance in a small subset of the sales funnel.

ROI Impact on a 50-Person Sales Team

We recently completed a 5-week trial run with a major real estate company whose sales

process focused heavily on:

● Cold calling.

● New lead generation.

The competition included a number of metrics, but for the purposes of this blog post,

let's focus on those two metrics in particular.

Average Daily Calls Per User

At initiation of the competition, the real estate sales team was averaging under 40

outbound phone calls per day. Within 4 weeks, that number had skyrocketed to 90 calls

per day, where it remained for the remainder of the competition.

The result, as the graph clearly illustrates, was a sizable impact on the sales reps' core

function at the top of the funnel: daily outbound calls.

Heartening results, right? In a sense -- but it fails to answer the ultimate question that

must be asked of any sales productivity tool -- does the increased productivity translate

to improvement in ROI?

Average Daily Leads Per User

The truly pivotal information occurs in the following graph.

Here, we see an excellent correlation in daily outbound calls and daily lead generation.

Prior to the competition, the company's sales reps' were averaging just under 5 leads

generated, per day.

Roughly 5 weeks into the competition, that number had jumped to 8 leads per day,

approaching an average of 9 by the end of the competition.

In this scenario, we saw the sales funnel expand not just at the top, but at the bottom as

well. More importantly, the mirror-image results indicate not just correlation, but

causation.

Incentivizing Across the Sales Funnel

Sales is a continuous, multi-faceted process, and your sales competitions should reflect

that reality. Optimizing your sales team isn't just about improving employee productivity,

it's about improving aggregate employee performance and creating an efficient,

coordinated sales process.

As our 5-week trial run in the Fortune 1000 Real Estate company indicates, focusing

competitions around metrics that span the full length of the sales funnel provides users

with a competition platform that accomplishes just that.

The results that you've just witnessed are just one example of Ambition's multi-metric

method working in a major sales organization. To find out how Ambition achieved very

similar results in Access America's logistics brokerage team, clickhere.

Thanks for reading, feel free to add any comments or questions below, or shoot me an

email at jeremy.boudinet@ambition.com.