It’s that time of year again! In a couple of weeks, your office is likely to be a flurry of college basketball, brackets, Cinderella stories, and buzzer-beaters. While this can serve as a huge distraction late in the quarter, I have a great way to keep the energy high while motivating your SDRs to some last-minute wins.
March SDR Brackets
I ran this competition every year that I managed an SDR team and it’s a lot of fun, while also being a good way to keep up the momentum during a traditionally slow time.
Set the rules
It seems straightforward, but make sure all the rules are clearly laid out and strictly adhered to. I always had a very easy to understand set of rules: whoever sets the most outbound demos over a 2 day period wins and moves on in the bracket. We resisted complicating it with stipulations about the demo having to occur, awarding points for effort, etc. because we wanted people focused on the task at hand. Take whatever the core goal of your SDR team is, and base it on that: meetings, demos, cold calls, discovery calls, etc.
Build a bracket
In a perfect world, the number of SDRs on your team would be divisible by 4 when making a bracket, but (at least in my experience) that never happens. How do you make a bracket when you have 19 SDRs? Good news, there are a bunch of websites that can do this for you: here’s my favorite one.
Seed your SDRs
You can either randomly assign the seed numbers or you can base it on previous performance. I’ve done both and I think I prefer randomly assigning seed numbers. If you have your best SDR competing against a chronic underperformer, it causes demotivation and possible sandbagging. However, if you want to reward a top performer with a first-round bye (for you non-sports people that means you don’t have to compete during the first round of the competition), you can seed based on performance.
Hype it up
You can see a photo above of the bracket that we made for this competition in 2017. If you can’t tell, it’s BIG. And it hung on the wall in the sales pit. Everyone knew it was going on, even all the sales reps. I was in a bit of a cost-cutting mode during this particular year, so as you can see top prize was $150 with a prize for 2nd and 3rd place. I encourage you to put a good amount of prize money (or rewards like headphones, flights, days off, etc.) toward this competition. I could even see doing something like $25 for each round you win so everyone feels like they have a shot at some cash.
If you can get your team to buy in on this competition, it can build a great pipeline for the beginning of Q2. I encourage you to try it and really get into it. Buy a whistle and ref uniform! Send out regular updates to the entire company! Oh, and if you need a way to track your team’s attainment — not just in March — you can check out QuotaPath. With our Teams functionality, you can increase transparency when it comes to commission and quota attainment for everyone on your team.
