

Ambition (YC W14) Brings Fantasy Football-Style Motivation to Sales Teams - micah_chatt
http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/ambition-launch/

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dpritchett
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.

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mathattack
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.

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oq
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.

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

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michaelochurch
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.

~~~
nostrademons
This reminds me of
[https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=9](https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=9)

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

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

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btrautsc
(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).

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redmattred
Looks a lot like InsightSquared

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ttruett
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.

