Flowbird, a CRM and software automation agency specializing in HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Make implementations, struggled with inconsistent sales performance and lack of real-time activity visibility. By implementing Geckoboard's TV dashboards, they transformed their sales culture through gamification and real-time metrics, leading to improved activity levels and faster deal progression.
Jason Rainbird is the Managing Director at Flowbird. His philosophy to sales is that activity leads to deals – you need to put the calls in.
It’s a fact that every sales person knows, if you make enough phone calls, you'll get some deals.
Weekly sales meetings created some bad habits
When Jason was looking to boost his sales team’s performance, his immediate focus was on improving activity. To do this they needed to be constantly aware of their activity numbers.
Previously, the sales team would meet weekly with their manager to review their performance. It would take the manager time to prepare the report and run through the data together with the reps.
This approach wasn’t working for them.
Jason noticed that certain inefficient behaviours were cropping up as a result of this weekly overview.
Some reps would cram work into the end of the week so that they met their targets, but this led to poorer quality calls and inconsistent output.
Alongside that, reps didn’t see how their performance compared to their peers as they only saw a view of their individual numbers.
Looking for sales gamification with TV dashboards
Jason was keen to introduce gamification and some friendly competition into the team by broadcasting activity metrics on TV screens within their office.
Flowbird uses HubSpot as their CRM so he looked to implement TV dashboards using the HubSpot internal reporting. This was fiddly. It required them to login and cast to the screen each morning, it didn’t look great and regularly timed out.
They tried Databox but found the activity metrics weren’t updating quick enough.
It was important to Jason that the dashboard was real-time.
I needed something that was going to update regularly because we’re focused on activity-based metrics. When the team logs activity in HubSpot, they want to see it showing up instantly.
This is when they tried Geckoboard.
Using leaderboards to gamify sales activity
With Geckoboard Jason was able to build TV dashboards powered by his HubSpot data to share important metrics such as calls for the day and week, leads created, leads activated, leads pursued, deals won and deals lost.
Jason was looking to gamify the sales activity. With Geckoboard he built a number of sales rep leaderboards that allowed individuals to see, for the first time, where they placed among their peers in terms of their performance.
Gamification is the important thing for us, that's what drives activity.
By gamifying a standard part of their sales process, Jason was able to encourage reps to take action. Jason introduced both daily and weekly leaderboards on their TV dashboards.
This worked really well by making sure every day was competitive, but also helped iron out bad habits like compressing all activity into the end of the week.
Improved team engagement with their KPIs
There’s been a change in the way that Jason’s sales team work since they began broadcasting activity metrics on TV dashboards.
This isn’t a stick and carrot scenario. The team wants to see the numbers. Sales can be a harsh role so if you can create some competition and some fun, people enjoy having that visibility.
There’s also been improvement in the handling of stale deals. Jason came back from his Christmas break and saw there was a large backlog of stale deals. Frustrated that they weren’t shifting, he added stale deals to the dashboard and very soon saw a change in behaviour.
Now that stale deals are constantly visible, they’re not hanging around like they used to.
In the past I would be discussing stale deals in a weekly meeting with the reps. But then the next week, we’d be in the same meeting looking at the same stale deals. Since including these on the TV dashboards, they see what needs to be done. I can go out there, look at the dashboard and they know they need to clear their stale deals because everyone can see them.
The Flowbird sales team are no longer relying on historic data from weekly meetings, they’re working with real-time updates on their daily performance, on show for the whole company to see.
The board makes a difference because it's permanently on display in the office.
Sharing the data openly on TV dashboards reinforces Jason’s philosophy around activity leading to sales. Everyone can see how more calls lead to more sales.
Want to transform your sales team’s performance with real-time dashboards? Try Geckoboard for 14 days free.
