If you are like me, you like making lists when you’re selling – lists of prospects, lists of companies, lists of funny cat videos (!) and so on.

But lists, once deposited in a CRM system somehow lose their lustre. No longer the dynamic, fresh, exciting ‘golden leads’ they once were.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful, if our prospect lists updated themselves?! Not just updating with latest prospect information (thanks LinkedIn and Nimble for helping here).  But how about if when someone moves jobs, their replacement comes along and adds themselves to the list without you lifting a finger!

Sounds like ‘cloud cuckoo land’? No sir! It’s a reality using a gamification technique applied to social selling – a Power Leaderboard.  The idea is that you create a leaderboard of your prospect list, pitting them against each other in an online game.

Now of course, you don’t call the game “my golden leads”. No instead you name the game as an aspirational list that your leads would like to be seen as part of.  I am currently selling to Sales Directors in the UK so I  created a sales prospecting list called the ‘UK Sales Directors Power 100’. It is a game of influence – who is the ‘most influential’ within the community. Each week I update the Klout scores of my prospects and tweet them their current rank.

As a social seller this brings me some great benefits:

1. It starts a conversation with prospects on a subject that isn’t about solely my product. I can engage with my buyers before I’ve even pitched them anything meaning I get warm leads from day one.
2. The players not only maintain their own contact details, but new players request to be added to the list.  For them it’s a chance to play a digital game with their peers, for me it’s free contact details submitted by the prospects themselves.
3. It makes me more interested in my prospects. Now that I have taken on an active role in their community, (that of ‘scorekeeper’) I have to remember to check in with them each week. Like all good social selling – it’s a two way street.

I’ve now seen the power leaderboard social selling technique work more than once so I’d love to see it being tried by readers of this blog.  If you’d like to read more, check out the Glass Of Bubbly case study which tells how one social seller managed to connect with French champagne brands and now gets invited to champagne tastings around the world.