Everything you need to know about car dealership sales leaderboards

A leaderboard is a type of scoreboard that lists the names and scores of top competitors. Golf tournaments often use leaderboards to list high-performing players. But they also appear in the gaming industry and others. They make it easy to see where each competitor stands based on their performance, with potentially detailed statistics alongside each name. Additionally, they appear in many industries as a means to motivate individuals, reward those who perform the best, and allow for a healthy level of competition.

Sales leaderboards are a specific type of leaderboard that uses software to help measure and consistently track the performance of sales staff. In the process, business owners can better determine how their sales teams are working to achieve business goals. 

These leaderboards can show how each employee is performing with side-by-side comparisons. This enables business owners and employees to easily figure out how close they are to reaching their targets. In addition, a good sales leaderboard application will give you the ability to customise leaderboards based on certain criteria. 

For car dealerships, this tool is invaluable. You can keep track of your sales to make sure inventory is moving. At the same time, you can reward the employees who make the most sales and congratulate individual employees each time they make a sale. You can also track performance with daily, weekly, or monthly reporting capabilities.

Sales leaderboards come with a few key features that can drive healthy competition and give you and your teams clear insight into performance. These features include:

Sales dashboard

This is the most important feature to have on a sales leaderboard. The sales dashboard gives you complete control over the leaderboard and the information available to you. You can see how the sales process works among your teams and compare individuals or teams on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. You can then use the information gathered to figure out how to further improve performance and drive more sales.

Compared to traditional sales reports, a sales dashboard offers deeper insights beyond simply which employees are your top performers. You can use this dashboard to set specific benchmarks for employees and compare each employee's performance to the specific targets you set for them. Additionally, you can find out exactly why certain employees are performing better than others and what they're doing to meet your business goals.

Sales dashboards also give you the ability to compare data every month. This allows you to look at certain metrics and compare them to determine how your sales efforts are performing overall. Based on these insights, you can decide what needs to be done to further optimise performance.

Forecast reports

A good dealership leaderboard will also provide you with forecast reports that help predict sales performance based on your current strategy. You'll be able to see how well you're likely to perform by using past data to help give future insights. Based on this information, you and your sales teams can begin developing a strategy for the next month and beyond. 

Forecast reports also reveal how many leads you'll need to convert to customers to meet your goals. In turn, you can determine what your teams need to do to meet the deadline for a particular target. You'll never need to worry about falling behind if you can plan accordingly using these forecasting capabilities.

Integration

A reliable sales leaderboard program will also enable you to integrate it with multiple third-party platforms. With the help of these integrations, you can make sure every member of your team has access to the leaderboard. 

By integrating the leaderboard with a team chat program, for example, team managers and members alike can communicate with each other regarding the leaderboard. Additionally, management staff can share other information that might influence sales members' performance, such as market updates in the automotive industry. 

You can also integrate this software with analytical tools that give you complete insight into performance at every level.

There are several types of metrics that a sales leaderboard should track for car dealerships. These include:

Sales volume

The sales volume tracks the number of vehicles sold, along with other sales, such as services. Sales volume helps dealerships gauge their health based on the number of sales they're making. They can then figure out how well or poorly their sales team is performing.

Deliverable volume

A deliverable volume tracks the amount of specific vehicles and services that dealerships currently have in their inventory. This helps leaders figure out whether the dealership has enough volume to achieve sales goals or has an insufficient number of deliverables.

Gross profit

Gross profit, or gross income, is the company's revenue with the cost of goods sold subtracted. By measuring gross profit, dealerships can better measure their overall efficiency in producing products or services. It takes into account materials, labour, equipment, credit card fees, and more.

Finance penetration

This metric measures the percentage of customers who buy vehicles and finance options. This shows how well sales staff can convert customers who've purchased a vehicle into customers who opt for financing. 

Aftermarket sales

Your dealership leaderboard should also allow you to track aftermarket sales, which include equipment or parts sold after making an initial sale. This metric can indicate how good your sales employees are at maximising sales and profits after selling a vehicle.

If you're still not sure whether it's worth integrating car sales leaderboards into how your dealership does business, there are several specific benefits that you'll get when implementing the right software. The following are the main advantages of using a comprehensive sales leaderboard:

1. Improved job satisfaction

Over time, your sales teams may lose motivation in their jobs, which may result in decreased overall satisfaction. If your employees aren't happy with their work, this could hurt their performance, which, in turn, will hurt your dealership. 

However, you can increase satisfaction with the help of a sales leaderboard. With the help of these programs, you can give employees a new and exciting way to engage with your dealership. Staff will be able to keep an eye on their performance and compare it to others, which can increase overall job satisfaction.

2. Improved performance

Not only can poor performance hurt your business's bottom line through decreased sales on their part, but it can also negatively affect morale across the rest of the sales team. This would lead others to perform poorly and further hinder your dealership's performance. This makes it important for dealerships to do what they can to maximise performance across their teams.

Using sales leaderboards, your sales employees would be able to clearly see their performance and compare it with the rest of the team, which can add a level of competition that encourages improved performance. Sales leaderboards can make competition both fun and friendly to motivate employees to do their best, particularly if they know they can expect a reward for their performance.

3. Accurate data tracking and reporting

A comprehensive car sales leaderboard will also make it easy to efficiently and accurately track and report. While sales managers would ordinarily only be able to track results for individual employees, a leaderboard would help monitor both individuals and teams with consistent efficiency and accuracy. In addition, the leaderboard offers real-time results to keep data consistently updated.

4. Gamification

One of the best ways to motivate sales teams and individual employees is to turn sales into a kind of game. Although the sales process is far from static, it often involves a lot of repetition that can become tedious for employees. 

By gamifying sales with a car sales leaderboard, you can make the sales process more enjoyable for team members. A leaderboard uses game mechanics to help revitalise the process and make it consistently exciting for employees. With the incorporation of certain rewards and even a simple "congratulations" message or visual when employees close a sale, employees will likely be more engaged.

5. Healthy competition

Sales leaderboards ultimately allow for healthy competition that can motivate staff without creating a toxic environment for them. While employees may feel more competitive, a leaderboard can make this competition playful and fun as opposed to pressuring. Because of this, you can create a generally healthier workplace for employees that doesn't lead to increased stress. This is crucial, seeing as around34% of respondents in one survey claimed to lose around an hour or more each day due to workplace stress.

Depending on what you're looking for, there are a few different types of sales leaderboard tools available, such as:

SalesLogs

If you're looking for reliable, intuitive dealership leaderboard software,SalesLogs Leaderboards offers a solution that includes a variety of features. This software is designed for owners and general managers, department managers, and individual sales team members. 

Using SalesLogs Leaderboards, you can see weekly and monthly sales achievements that keep all of your employees focused on reaching their goals. You'll be able to clearly visualise performance to measure performance against each employee. This solution also offers real-time daily sales performance updates that keep everyone up to date at all times.

Another feature is the ability to celebrate new sales with a virtual confetti cannon. This is a great way to lift your employees whenever they make a sale, further motivating them.

Spreadsheets

Another option includes spreadsheets. Although dealerships and other businesses have used spreadsheets for many years due to their general reliability, they come with certain disadvantages. One of the biggest is increased costs via inefficiencies and inaccuracies, according toa report from Quantrix. Ultimately, spreadsheets may be easy to create. But they can be cumbersome to manage and less accessible than more innovative leaderboard solutions.

Keep in mind that you'll need to manually update spreadsheets, which can lead to inaccurate numbers and take up more time. Software like SalesLogs, on the other hand, helps automate the process while maintaining accurate data. 

Whiteboards

Whiteboard leaderboards have also been around for years. But they also come with certain inefficiencies that can hinder rather than help your teams' performance. 

Like spreadsheets, traditional whiteboard leaderboards require manual inputs that can lead to inaccurate data. Unlike spreadsheets and other digital leaderboards, it's even harder to mitigate this with a physical whiteboard that's not connected to any other system. You'll also be unable to track who made changes to the data presented, which can prevent dealerships from holding employees accountable if the whiteboard contains errors.

Another inconvenience experienced with whiteboards is their physical restriction. While you can still share spreadsheets with employees digitally to allow access from anywhere at any time, whiteboards remain in a solitary location in the office. This means that only those regularly near the whiteboard would be able to see leaderboard data consistently, while other employees would need to move to where the whiteboard is to view it. It can also be difficult to choose the most appropriate location for whiteboards in an office, particularly if your teams consist of many employees.

With the many benefits they offer, digital sales leaderboards like SalesLogs Leaderboards are ideal to implement for car dealerships of all types and sizes. Using the right leaderboard will keep your teams competitive, motivated, happy, and productive. This will then translate to improved performance for your business as you continually meet sales targets with more efficiency.