Sales Leaderboards Across 3 Markets: A Contractor Case Study

Empire Home Exteriors is a 130-employee contracting company operating across three New York markets: Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. When their COO wanted every employee to see how their market performed against the others, the IT Director — a one-person department — needed something he could ship in days, not months.

How They Found Leaderboarded

Marcus, their IT Director, came from managing over 200,000 network nodes at Cornell University. He'd seen enterprise complexity up close and had no appetite for it. The COO found Leaderboarded while searching for ways to display market performance, showed it to Marcus, and asked him to test it.

"He just showed it to me and said, 'Hey, look at this. Can you play with it?'"

A few days of testing later, the decision was made.

"We're still using it and love it."

What sealed it: automatic reordering when numbers change. No manual sorting, no wrestling with CSV exports and custom graphs. The percentage-to-goal tracking worked out of the box.

The Setup

Marcus tracks two metrics per market — sales revenue and production (jobs completed and ready for payment). He created three separate boards (Shows, Sales, Production) and embedded them into the company's Google Sites employee portal using iframes. All 130 employees can open the portal and see where each market stands.

He matched the leaderboard colors to company branding, so it looks like a native part of the portal rather than a bolted-on third-party tool.

The daily workflow is simple: every morning, Marcus manually enters the previous day's numbers from their CRM. When he hits enter, the rankings update instantly.

Digital Screen Display

Early on, the company ran a digital screen in the office showing the leaderboard continuously. Employees saw the standings when they walked in. Marcus plans to bring this back — the always-visible display creates a different kind of awareness than a portal people have to actively open.

What It Actually Does for the Team

The leaderboard isn't a replacement for the CRM. It doesn't do deep analysis, drill-downs, or pipeline tracking. It answers exactly one question: "Where do we rank?"

"It's creating a friendly competition between different areas."

That turns out to be enough. Salespeople care about how their market is performing relative to the others. Managers get a fast read on which markets need attention before opening the CRM for the full picture. Everyone can celebrate when their market takes the lead.

Why Salesforce Won't Replace It

The company is migrating to Salesforce, which raises the obvious question: won't Salesforce dashboards make this redundant?

Marcus doesn't think so. Leaderboarded shows a simple visual scoreboard to everyone — including employees who have no reason to log into a CRM and wouldn't know how to navigate one.

"I do like how Leaderboarded formats things. Our CRM reports are generally CSV files that you have to manipulate — not necessarily the most visually appealing solution."

Accessibility matters here. A leaderboard anyone can read in five seconds from the portal serves a different purpose than an analytics tool built for sales managers.

The Practical Calculus

As a one-person IT department, Marcus can't justify tools that take weeks to implement and require ongoing maintenance. Leaderboarded went from "COO shows me a link" to "all 130 employees can see live market performance" in a matter of days.

The price point helped too. Marcus said anything over $250 annually would trigger a search for alternatives. Leaderboarded came in well under that.

"The application's been absolutely wonderful."

Manual entry takes 5-10 minutes each morning to update three markets. For a tool that's running continuously and visible to the entire company, that's an easy trade.

Want to set up market or team leaderboards for your own distributed business? See how Leaderboarded works for sales teams on the sales leaderboard page, or get started for free and have something running today.