Comparison is the thief of joy...and sales results

Most sales floors publish a board with names in order of performance. Does that improve team performance?

The short answer is that it mostly does not, and in a multi-year experiment run on salespeople directly, the group that stopped being told their rank outsold the group that kept getting it. Feedback in general does help on average, but rank is the least useful form of it, because it tells you where you stand and nothing about what to do differently.

Researchers pooled more than 600 experiments on feedback of every kind, and the average effect was positive while more than a third of those interventions made performance worse. That is an odd result for something many sales leaders assume is obviously good. The pattern in the failures was consistent enough that the authors built a theory around it; the more a piece of feedback pulls attention toward the person and away from the task, the less likely it is to help. Being told you are fourteenth out of thirty is almost entirely information about you and almost none about the work.

One experiment tested this on salespeople directly, running for three years inside a furniture retailer with roughly 1,750 commissioned sellers. Some salespeople could see their rank among their coworkers; others had that information taken away. Sales increased about 11 percent among the salespeople who stopped seeing their rank. Researchers also tested whether showing people a benchmark alongside their rank would help. It did better than showing rank alone, but not better than giving people no ranking information at all. Interestingly, the researcher found that when rank information was removed, men’s sales went up, while women’s sales did not change significantly. Still, the main finding is straightforward: seeing where you stand relative to your coworkers did not motivate these salespeople—it appears to have hurt their performance.

A much larger study looked at more than 27,000 salespeople across 170 companies. The researchers compared three types of sales rankings: rankings where everyone's identity was hidden, rankings where names were shown, and rankings where names and individual quotas were shown. The rankings with names produced the best overall results: salespeople were more likely to hit quota and less likely to leave the company. Adding each salesperson's quota to the ranking removed the improvement in quota attainment, although it still reduced turnover. Unlike the furniture-store experiment, this study suggests that rankings aren't inherently harmful. What matters is what the ranking tells people—and what it makes salient.

If your goal is productivity, the evidence suggests that a public, identifiable leaderboard can be useful, particularly when the metric is clear and directly tied to the outcome you care about. But the furniture experiment shows that simply telling someone “you're #17” can backfire—especially if the ranking makes poor performers feel defeated rather than giving them a clear path to improve.

Use the leaderboard to create productive social comparison, not merely to tell people where they stand.

Researchers have also combined 79 randomized trials covering more than a 1.3M people, across health, energy use, and workplace performance. They found that telling people how they compare with others does change behavior, but the average effect is small. That fits the sales research: comparison can influence effort, but it probably isn't powerful enough to carry performance on its own.

Salespeople may believe the leaderboard keeps them sharp, but the evidence gives us little reason to think that simply knowing your position reliably improves performance. Two explanations fit the results, though neither is settled: people near the top may ease off once their position feels secure, while people near the bottom may decide the gap is not worth chasing. What is clearer is what rank cannot do. Rank cannot tell you that you are losing deals at the proposal stage, that your discovery calls are running short, or that most of your wins trace back to one referral source you have been neglecting. The main issue with focusing on rank is that it likely won't meaningfully change your actions or sales practices.

Don’t make the leaderboard your weekly review. It tells you where you ended up, but it carries little instruction about what to change. Spend that time on the numbers only you can see: how many first meetings you set, where deals die in the process, and which conversations you would run differently now. When you ask a manager for feedback, ask about a specific call rather than your standing, because feedback aimed at the work gives you something you can actually improve. And if you’re near the top of the board, don’t mistake a good position for proof that you have nothing to change.