How Prominent Are Your League Tables?

The very first salesroom I ever walked into. A whiteboard adorned one of its 'modern' prefab walls. Just three columns. No border taping, no underlining.

Each row; deal value (margin amount), Customer Name, SRs initials.

Written up by the seller themselves, the moment the order came home.

Then at end of each month - albeit often the 35th of said month - book closed, board wiped clean. Start again.

In my first ever cubrep role a good while later, I couldn't wait to walk up to said whiteboard myself that first time. I even commandeered a marker pen that was in different colour to the norm. Kept it in my drawer, out of grabbing hands reach. Deep purple. Just because. Quite the moment when it duly came. Then swiftly on to the next, obvs.

This simple format proved remarkably durable. Pretty much as-is appears still today. A visual of progress for all to see.

In Don't Sweat The Small Stuff, Rory Sutherland made the not unreasonable point that people would rate their internet banking experience higher if their balance was not writ large the instant they logged in.

Our career status concern is not the same as fright from how little we may have in the bank.

Beyond the order book tally, the one number that ought be a consistent guide throughout any salesteam is the percentage of quota.

We're all digital now. I actually wonder how many a salesteam system has the 'live' percentage on the welcome screen? Let alone a current rank alongside?

And as Mr Sutherland suggests, you can always click through for depth. By periods, sectors, teams. Slice 'n dice.

I often get talked through some procedure or other on a personal level on someone's view of their reporting system. I guess in our AI dawn, and with ISV and app subs supposedly tanking, the amount of shadow and parallel reporting is set to soar. Standalone sellers tailoring from scratch what they want to record and see that would typically have little in common with any central system.

Which may well make it even more crucial to show someone's place on the log.

I worry that in an age of endemic participation medalling, such neon-flashing essential indicators could be banished by the captured as troubling and triggering. As FT stats guru, John Burn-Murdoch laments around the removal of performance tables across UK schools, "Every single piece of evidence we have — from England, from other countries, from other domains like healthcare — is that performance tables and targets are hugely effective."

Just because the idea was around in the Eighties doesn't mean it must be put in the same bin as fluoro leg warmers. Where's your tables?