Most sales teams have a leaderboard of some kind. It might be a dashboard in the CRM, a slide in the Monday meeting or a screen on the office wall, but it does the same job. It ranks everyone by revenue against target, and everybody can see who’s at the top and who’s at the bottom.
I’ve no problem with a leaderboard. Results matter, sellers are competitive and most of them like to know the score. The trouble starts when it becomes the main way a leader judges their people, because it can only tell you who is ahead. It can’t tell you why, and without the why it’s very hard to develop anyone.
A place on the table is part person and part circumstance
A person’s position on the leaderboard is a mix of two things. Part of it is them. For a business developer, that’s how well they prospect, qualify, build a value case and get a clear commitment from the buyer. For an account manager, it’s how well they understand the customer’s business, reach the right people and find room to grow. For customer success or a sales engineer, it’s how far customers trust them and keep coming back to them. The rest is their circumstances, and that part can be bigger than it looks.
The same is true whatever your leaderboard measures. Plenty of teams rank people on more than revenue: new customers won, pipeline created, renewals, account growth, customer satisfaction, or activity like calls and meetings booked. Every one of those mixes what the person did with what they were given.
Over 25 years of leading and advising sales teams, I’ve seen plenty of positions on the table that had more to do with circumstances than with the person. For example:
- A business developer whose territory has three times the opportunity of the one next to it.
- An account manager who inherited two big accounts that renew every year, whatever they do.
- A customer success manager whose renewal rate looks great because their customers had a good year.
- One large deal that landed this quarter after two years of someone else’s work.
- A product that’s selling itself this year, or one that nobody wants.
- The leads that marketing happened to send their way.
None of that shows up on the leaderboard. Two sellers can both be at 80% of target for opposite reasons. One has a thin territory and is doing excellent work to get that far. The other has a big inherited account holding their figures up and hasn’t opened a new customer in a year. The table ranks them side by side, but they need completely different conversations with their manager.
In sales, it’s sometimes better to be lucky than talented. But imagine if you were both! When you can see which part of someone’s result is luck, you can work on the talent, so their results hold up when the luck runs out.
Coaching effort tends to be led by the table, and that’s where it goes wrong
When the leaderboard is the main measure, coaching tends to follow it.
The people at the top get left alone. They’re hitting target, so there seems to be nothing to fix, and nobody checks whether the result came from their skill or from their accounts. If it’s the accounts, you’ll find out when the accounts change, and by then it’s a much harder conversation.
The people at the bottom get pressure, and it’s usually pressure on activity: more calls, more meetings and a closer eye on the pipeline. That can help someone whose problem is effort. It does very little for someone who struggles to qualify, or who doesn’t believe they belong in front of senior buyers. They end up doing more of what isn’t working, and the gap gets wider.
The people in the middle often get the least attention of all, because they’re never far enough from target to worry anyone, even though that’s where a lot of a team’s growth is waiting.
There’s a cost for the sellers too. When people know they’re being ranked against each other, many start defending their position. They hold on to good leads, keep quiet about what’s going wrong in a deal and treat a coaching conversation as a judgement rather than help. It’s hard to develop someone who feels they’re being marked.
The leaderboard often picks your next managers
There’s one more place the leaderboard can become an issue, and it’s an expensive one. When a sales manager role opens up, the person at the top of the table is often first in line. Sometimes that’s the right call. But the table was ranking their results, which may have come partly from the level of opportunity in their accounts, and it says nothing about whether they can coach, build a team or hold people to account.
It’s one of the most common routes into sales management, and it’s why so many new managers have to learn the job the hard way. You can lose a strong seller and gain a struggling manager in the same move.
A ranking and a standard are different things
A ranking compares people with each other. A standard compares each person with what their role needs. That sounds like a small difference, but it changes almost everything about how you manage.
A standard starts with the skills and behaviours that win deals, grow accounts, keep clients engaged or make someone a trusted technical expert. For a business developer that might be prospecting, finding the root cause of a customer’s problem and helping them put a figure on the reason to change. For an account manager it’s more likely to be managing stakeholders across a large customer and growing revenue from it. Underneath those are the things everyone in a commercial role needs, like taking responsibility for outcomes, discipline and being open to coaching. Then there’s what drives each person and how their natural style comes across to a customer, which often explains what a skills score can’t.
When you hold each person up against that, the questions change. You stop asking who’s behind and start asking what each person needs to do better, whether they’re at the top of the table or the bottom. Your best performer gets a development plan too, because the standard shows you what they could still improve. The seller at the bottom gets help with the one thing that’s holding them back, rather than a target for more calls.
It changes how the team feel about it as well. A ranking always has someone in last place. A standard is something everyone can move towards, and in my experience people are far more willing to work on their gaps when the comparison is with the job rather than with the person at the next desk.
Keep the leaderboard, but don’t manage development from it
None of this means throwing the leaderboard away. Results are what the business runs on, and the table tells you quickly when something has changed, and it links rewards to success. Use it for what it’s good at.
Just don’t let it decide who needs coaching, what they need coaching on or who should lead the team next. Those decisions need a view of each person against the standard for their role, and the leaderboard was never built to give you that.
How we approach it
This is the problem the MyAcumen Team Diagnostic was built to solve. It measures each person against the standard for their role: ten core skills everyone needs, ten more for their specific job, what motivates them, their natural style and, where you include it, how their colleagues see them. Mya, our AI analyst, then reads across all of it to show what’s behind each person’s results, and you can ask it questions about the whole team.
If you’d like a quicker first look, the free mini-assessment takes about four minutes and shows you where the gaps in your team are likely to be.
