Ambition (YC W14) Brings Fantasy Football-Style Motivation to Sales Teams | Hacker News Reader

Ambition (YC W14) Brings Fantasy Football-Style Motivation to Sales Teams

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27 pointsmicah_chatt15 comments

It's probably something to do with my being a developer rather than a salesperson, but I find this level of zero-sum internal competition a bit terrifying.

Sales is much more publicly metric driven than development.

Many top sales organizations have public quotas, with quarterly contests, and public records showing how everyone is doing against it.

The nature of sales (public wins and failures, lots of banging your head into the wall on a daily basis to support an unknown long term outcome) is why there are a lot of athletes that get into it.

The app seems to be very much in line with this type of thinking.

But yes - it would never work for developers.

I'm a developer for Ambition, and the product focuses on encouraging competition, but not "zero sum" competition. The salespeople are grouped into teams, so a lot of the fun and motivation comes from wanting your team to do as well as possible.

The success of your team is also not at the expense of the teams you're competing against, at least in terms of real world sales/results. Sure, only one team is going to come out on top of any given matchup, but not because they've had to sabotage the team they're competing against.

Developers compete with each other too, although perhaps not as openly. For example, developers who consistently produce less than their peers will eventually be fired, or not given raises.

I used to work at a major bank on the sales team and I can't tell you how instrumental it is to have a transparent tool like this across the organization to help motivate you so you can see where you stand and feel part of something bigger as you're individually speaking to customers. Top performers are highly motivated by this.

Our system at the bank was pretty janky, but the top sellers obviously made it their job to learn inside out. From what I can tell, this is the tool that I wish we'd had, where you not only get the motivation through transparency, but it seems like the performance on the service very closely correlates with the $s that would be going into my pocket.

It would be cool if you guys had some kind of rewards for different tiers of performers.

(Ambition dev here) Thanks for the encouragement. This is exactly what we are trying to tap.

Change the name. I wrote the card game Ambition and strongly object to sharing a name with a stack-ranking app. I had it first, by 11 years.

This reminds me of https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=9

Doubly funny (in a dark way) due to Michael's turbulent relationship with YC via HN.

Aren't sales teams already being motivated by earning commissions on sales? Why would this software motivate them more than cold, hard cash?

(cofounder of Ambition here, thanks for the comment Mr Yoda) We believe there is major difference in intrinsically and extrinsically motivating sales performance (and changing behavior).

While commission checks are a great carrot, many companies unfortunately find an atmosphere where the top 10% of the sales floor is excelling and celebrated, and the middle 70% is ignored or has reached a plateau.

One of the major benefits in Ambition is that by competing in teams, now top sales people are empowered to be leaders for their peers and incentivized to coach and share best practices.

Which provides dramatic improvements in metrics and ultimately revenue. (and also importantly, builds camaraderie and culture).

Ambition co-founder here.

You're definitely right that sales teams are motivated by commission. What we've come to find out, both working in these teams and managing them, is that the most powerful drivers still are intrinsic. Recognition, camaraderie, purpose, being a part of something bigger than oneself...

I think sales teams get a bad reputation because of the lone-wolves, most people working these types of jobs might be more "alpha" than others but still want to feel like they are making an actual impact in something, even if it's just getting their team a "W" for the week.

Commissions do not really motivate after a while. I was a straight commission outside salesperson for 10 years. The money was not the motivator for me, it was the contests. The desire to WIN was much stronger than the desire for a bigger paycheck. Fortunately winning the contest also resulted in a big paycheck.

Winning was much more satisfying than money. This system works better for a company if the sales team is evenly matched. In our 7 person group there was only two guys I really competed with - one left to start his own company (and I later worked for him) and the other guy became my manager. Having a manager that you have bested in every sales contest is not good. I was RIF'd on Feb 14th 2000.

Looks a lot like InsightSquared

Just checked out InsightSquared, we're definitely similar.

While relatively subtle, the main difference seems to be that we're more of a motivational tool whereas they are more of an analytical tool.

We're trying to position Ambition to where it's primary purpose is to drive numbers, not just look at them. Yes transparency through reporting is part of that, it's just more passive and it's easy for people to become paralyzed by data.

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