Fantasy football has become immensely popular in the United States with approximately 33 million people registering or playing in a league this season. Why is it so popular?
People love competition, and they love to win even more.
That’s why Ambition, a startup company founded by three University of Tennessee grads, is looking to take the competitive idea of fantasy football and apply it to the world of sales. Imagine being able to divide up your sales staff into different “teams” that would compete against each other through metrics such as calls made, leads generated, profit, and etc.
Companies now have the ability to make sales more fun through Ambition’s software. It’s also way more than a game, says Co-Founder Brian Trautschold.
“Other than making sales more fun, it gives companies real-time data on their sales representatives that no other software can currently offer,” Trautschold, who says he and his friends had some of their best ideas during late nights at UT’s library back in college.
“It saves managers times, makes the day-to-day more fun for reps, and helps companies make more money.”
The ability to save managers time is a big selling point for the platform. Sales managers at businesses, especially those with widespread regional locations, often spend a significant amount of time generating reports to pass on to upper management.
“What Ambition is trying to do is to provide both automatic reporting and creating more coaching opportunities,” Trauschold said. “It lets managers know when salespeople are or are not machining calls or not providing the right kind of customer service.”
By providing real-time data about the performance of reps, while making it a competitive (and fun) atmosphere, Ambition hopes to change the culture of sales departments across the county. Currently being used by 25-28 companies, Ambition has seen rapid growth since May; and plans to continue to create value add-ons to its service that will make it a must-have for sales departments everywhere.
Check out some screen shots of the software with the functionality of each page explained below.
This is a home page for an individual sales representative. It shows each person’s progress toward various sales goals like calls made, sales won, etc.
This is the team dashboard where sales representatives and managers can see how everyone is doing in comparison with each other and industry standards.
This is a look at the team by team comparisons and the part of the software interface that most resembles typical fantasy football.
On this page, employees can see how their team is doing. This allows them to compare themselves to their coworkers and also serve as motivation to work harder. It also allows managers to have coaching opportunities to see when representatives are struggling and when they might need some help.
