Digital leaderboards vs. traditional whiteboards - which is better?

Historically, leaderboards have played a major role in motivating sales staff and other employees to do their best for many businesses, including dealerships. Leaderboards harness the power of gamification to introduce game elements to the workplace, which drives competitiveness. Leaderboards can either use competitive indicators of progress to motivate employees or rank people's successes based on the criteria they meet. They're highly effective, largely because of the way they visually represent sales and staff performance. When implemented correctly, a sales leaderboard can drive employees to optimise their performance, leading to better results.

Many businesses have relied on whiteboards to develop sales leaderboards. These types of leaderboards can be effective to some extent. However, a digital sales leaderboard can yield even better results and further boost performance. If you're considering introducing a leaderboard or upgrading an existing one, the following will review the benefits and disadvantages of traditional whiteboard dealership leaderboards vs. digital leaderboards.

Limitations of traditional whiteboard leaderboards

For many years, businesses have used traditional whiteboard leaderboards to keep track of employee progress and ranking. As progress and positions change, it's easy to simply erase the current data with the wipe of an eraser and enter new data. However, this method is potentially inefficient and could hinder your leaderboard in several ways. These include:

Inaccurate data

Due to the manual labour involved in updating your whiteboard leaderboard, inaccuracies are rarely mitigated. It's more difficult to verify whether the data is correct without a digital system. Also, finding out who made any updates is a task in and of itself. This is why whiteboards are often inadequate if you want to keep data accurate and keep track of changes.

Location

The location of the board is often difficult to choose. But its place is not always the best for everyone—instead, it's best for certain individuals in a specific office or department. While limiting the whiteboard to a single area can boost productivity among the staff in that area, it can make other departments unproductive. Sales leaderboards can also become worthless to staff when they are outside of the dealership.

Process

This is arguably the most disastrous limitation, as management is handicapped by the limited method of recording information on the whiteboard. Management is not easily made aware of any errors, delays, omissions, or information inaccuracies. In fact, they may remain unaware of them entirely. In turn, dealerships suffer from ineffective and purely reactive management. Instead, it's best to have a system in place that allows for proactive management that identifies and addresses issues with the leaderboard before they can worsen.

Benefits of a digital leaderboard

Whiteboards have been used for many years, but their ineffectiveness has made them outdated. Today's technology allows for optimally efficient leaderboards. Specifically, a digital sales leaderboard offers benefits you won't find with old-school whiteboards.

Data Accuracy

Unlike whiteboards that require manual input and increase the risk of inaccurate information, digital leaderboards make it easy to maintain accurate data. You can match leaderboard data to other digital systems to update according to performance and specific metrics. This helps ensure that data is consistently up-to-date to maintain an accurate leaderboard that keeps everyone focused on their goals.

Real-time reporting

To help further motivate your employees, having real-time reporting capabilities embedded in your leaderboard is beneficial. With a digital solution, you can update everyone with daily activity reports. As data updates, it will appear live on your leaderboard to show who's truly ahead. This also eliminates the need for manual updates, frees up more time while reducing the risk of input errors and a lack of accountability.

Accessibility

Whiteboards can only appear in one place at a time, which can be advantageous to employees in that area while leaving everyone else out of the loop. You can make sure this is never an issue using digital dealership leaderboards. All of your employees can access your updated leaderboard via their computers or mobile devices using the web.

Whenever an employee wants to look at the leaderboard, they can access it online and see accurate data with every view. An interactive digital leaderboard will also make it easy for employees to view individual employee progress and compare daily, weekly, or monthly leaderboards.

Automatic reports and notifications

With automatic reports and notifications that update with changing data, you'll be able to keep employees motivated more regularly. For example, as soon as an employee closes a sale, they could receive a notification detailing who made the sale and what type of sale it involved, such as a new or used vehicle. This shows the successful employee that their efforts are appreciated and celebrates them.

Simultaneously, other employees feel more driven to match or even exceed that employee's success. Even if employees are in different departments, seeing progress in one could still motivate another.

Everything you need to know about car dealership sales leaderboards

Get the most from a sales leaderboard with a digital solution

Whiteboards have long helped sales teams keep track of employee performance and keep them motivated. But today's innovations in digital sales leaderboards have dramatically improved leaderboards. Using the right solution like SalesLogs leaderboards, you can:

• Maintain the accuracy of the data
• Optimise accessibility across all departments
• Continually motivate employees with automatic reports and updates

In turn, your employees will continue to do their best, which will help your dealership grow and remain competitive.