I have a confession to make, I think stack ranking your team is stupid.

There I came right out and said it.

Why? two reasons actually…

the public reason: the only people who care about ranking are those who are competitive when compared against other people.

Now you might think that is everyone in sales, but in my years of coaching I’d like to tell you that although competitiveness does run in salespeople, that isn’t’ how all of them measure success. In fact it isn’t even how MOST people that I’ve worked with measure their success. Here are the top three I hear:
> better than my last year
> against my goal
> vs. the expectations I have for myself

the running your team reason: I don’t see how stack ranking is a valid way to determine where to spend your time, energy, or effort.

No matter what your list will always be 1 to X. Which is why I’m always confused about how can you motivate everyone on your team, if the goal is to beat other people on the same team.

This is the reason when people try to share their stack rankings with me, my first question is “what do you want the result of reviewing stack ranking lists to be?”