How the Dallas Mavericks created a culture of inclusiveness and celebration across their sales departments

Challenges

Within the Mavs organization, the sales account team is divided into 5 departments—season ticket sales, group sales, premium sales, service and retention, and sales associates. Each department has individual goals and separate KPIs, but before implementing Ambition, they were all being measured on the same system.

The system they used was called the Hustle Score, which gamified the rep activity level across the sales org. After implementing, Scott realized how different each team’s activity and output was. One department may be set to make a certain number of calls to hit their quota, while another department was aiming to set meetings all day. It became difficult to see how teams were actually performing on an individual and team level without a holistic overview. How could the team be successful if they were all using the same scoring system for different jobs?

As a tool for celebration, they were also using what they called the jumbotron (a sales TV), which would ding when someone closed a sale or booked a meeting. The problem? They were in the middle of the pandemic.

Since the team was remote, they lost a lot of the sales floor energy they had when they were in office. There was no way to have a TV or triggers across the company, so visibility and celebration were lost. 

Solution

As a self-proclaimed nerd, part of Scott’s job is to research and vet tech companies and platforms to help the team become more productive and efficient. While Scott had already started to think about how to better structure the sales departments, he was not actually looking to invest in a sales performance platform. One of Scott’s commitments to himself was to nearly always say ‘yes’ when a cold email came through about demoing a software solution. He had previously heard about Ambition through another team in the NBA, so when an email came through about Ambition, he couldn’t say no.

After seeing Ambition, making the decision to switch was simple, he said. The feature that caught Scott’s attention the most was the universal activity score of 100 with the ability to weight activity on the back end. This gave reps the chance to aim for the same activity score, while still being able to focus on their individual goals. It also gave the sales leaders and managers the insight they needed on team and individual productivity.

As an organization, the Mavs have always implemented and gone all out for team competitions. The sales managers dress up and decorate the entire office. The spirit of competition and fueling engagement has always been there, but they needed the right tracking system to understand the impact. Scott would track activity in spreadsheets, hoping to predict positive outcomes, but this was wildly time consuming and inefficient. 

Results

The results also speak for themselves. After the first competition, where the teams chose countries and competed in the Sales Olympics, their activity scores were up 40 percent. Their call volume was at its highest in September, which correlated with the month-long, org-wide Olympic themed contest, The 41st OlympiMav. 

With Ambition, the workflows and live notifications can be sent to email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams. The TV is a live URL, meaning anyone can see the leaderboard at any given time. This helped with the visibility into activity, which led to much more celebrating and brought back the energy the team was missing working remotely.