Plecto Helps Danish Newspaper Boost Sales 27%

The Challenge

Jyllands-Posten’s strong market position as one of Denmark’s biggest newspapers wasn’t built in a day. A few years ago, a journey started in the Direct Sales team to create a stronger culture and a higher level of performance.

Back in the day, the team relied on whiteboards and internal digital dashboards to track their numbers. While this might sound like a viable, low-cost solution, these practices were actually scattering valuable sales data or removing it from circulation altogether.

“Sometimes (the team) just drew a line on the whiteboard with the sales, and that was that,” says Morten Thybo, Performance and Operational Data Specialist at Jyllands-Posten. “Some data was deleted after six months.”

“The department was hidden in the basement,” he adds.

For that reason, it was essential that the team figured out a way to display their sales data and KPIs to the rest of the company.

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The Solution

In 2022, Morten had been on Jyllands-Posten’s sales team for one year. His mission? Cleaning up inefficient procedures and started building a new structure for the sales team.

For the performance and data specialist, bringing Plecto into the picture was the way forward. “In a performance game, sometimes you have to do the hard thing to say, Okay, this is not working for you. And without any system, without any logging, we have no chance to say, We tried to improve you, but it didn't happen,” Morten says. “We needed some place where we could log and follow up very tightly to clean up.

“So that was the main reason that we chose Plecto. All of its other aspects” —such as gamification and live reporting— “were more, Hmm, nice, we can do this.”

Building a Stronger Team Culture

Getting the sales team’s numbers up wasn’t merely a matter of telling them to work harder.

Rather, it was about changing team values and culture, says Mads Abild Meyer, Strategic Business Developer at JP/Politikens Hus and former Head of Direct Sales at Jyllands-Posten. Plecto’s live data visualization was the tool that helped bridge this gap.

In addition, Mads and his sales coaches worked on changing the team culture through more impactful coaching and informed sales practices. Mads describes how the team uses an efficiency score to track employee productivity. An employee who is perfectly efficient one day will leave work with a 100 percent score.

But the intent of the efficiency score isn’t to belittle employees or micromanage them. Rather, it’s about seeing the effect of everyone’s contributions to team goals—and watching a more unified, motivated, and efficient culture result.

“I have a business background, so if you look at the theory books, it's a horrible idea. It's really horrible,” Mads laughs.

But he is quick to point out this idea is different in practice. “If we use Plecto as a tool to tell people, You're not doing enough, or You're not doing great, or Somebody else is doing better, I think that would feel like micromanaging,” he says.

“But we are actually using the numbers to showcase and celebrate people who are developing and people who are doing their best, even if maybe it's just not their day.

“We would never say to someone, Oh, you were only 60 percent efficient today. Never. We have never done that. And there have been no complaints and no pressure put on people to reach that 100 percent,” Mads says.

“Instead, it is a tool to showcase that today you had a really rough day, but you did a hell of a job trying. If you do it looking at it for the right purposes, it's not micromanaging. It's more about creating awareness.”

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Celebrating Wins, Big and Small

An additional component of the team’s culture boost has been the use of streaks. Employees can monitor their call and sales data on personalized Dynamic Dashboards, where their results from the previous day are posted every morning.

“To calculate this, we consider: Do you have a schedule? Do you have to work today? Have you done over 20 calls? Then we count it as you have been at work,” Morten says. “Do you make one call a day? We made one sale. And then we add those together.

“We make one line every day for this and put it into the data source. And when there's one day we don't make a sale, the next line will be zero. So, we are just always showing the last line from the data source.”

While dashboards like these help the team meet their goals for the daily grind, there is definitely a place reserved for fun too. The team’s Milestone Dashboard lets the team observe their ongoing progress towards hitting 1 million DKK (€134,000) in sales revenue—an evergreen initiative followed by a special celebration.

“Every time you sell for one million, they celebrate. No matter what time it is. That's what happens,” Morten says. “(The) Milestone Dashboard counts down from one million. When it hits zero, the team celebrates with cake or something.”

Personal Growth Through Dynamic Coaching

Plecto’s Dynamic Dashboards, which let employees toggle between their individual and team stats, have promoted a culture of individual and team accountability, allowing employees to own their performance and serving as the basis for more effective coaching.

“Employees can go and look up: How am I performing on that single performance metric that we are focusing on? And then it's the job of the coaches to give them the tools to reach new goals,” Mads says.

Sales management at Jyllands-Posten is a big fan of Plecto’s Dynamic Dashboards, which allow for both team and individual views. The individual dashboards have become crucial components for goal-setting in employee 1:1s.

“What we are defining is the way to reach the goal,” Mads says. “So I like to call it the work area instead of the final. It's more about how to get there than getting there.”

The Results

If numbers really could talk, they would certainly have a tale to tell about Jyllands-Posten’s sales team. Since Plecto was introduced in 2022, the team increased its sales revenue by 26.9% within three years.

Additionally, from 2022-2025, the team maintained a remarkable 243-shift sales streak, as well as a 700-day employee retention average.

It’s important to note that Plecto by itself didn’t magically change the culture of Jyllands-Posten’s sales team. “Plecto has been a lever or a tool in that development and culture change that we have been through,” Mads says.

“I think that, to be quite frank, it's more about the culture that made the results. But we cannot underestimate how much of a difference Plecto has made as a tool in that culture change.”

Mads’ conclusion about Plecto?

That it’s a powerful, versatile visualization tool with strong potential for building team motivation.

“There's a lot of different ways of showcasing everything,” he says. “There are the personal goals that you put in yourself. There is the visualizing aspect.

“(But)I think it's more about using Plecto as a tool to showcase the numbers that result from your positive culture, rather than for showing metrics about how you have to do better.”

Inspired by Jyllands-Posten’s story and want a powerful dashboard solution to amplify your sales team’s performance?

Check out the following links—and sign up for a free Plecto trial or demo below.

Personalize Performance with Dynamic Dashboards | Plecto

Real-time Sales Dashboards | Plecto

Media Dashboards | Dashboard Examples from Plecto

*Disclaimer: We are committed to data privacy. All dashboard images in this customer story have been provided by our customer, Jyllands-Posten. Names, identification photos, and some data have been altered for security. Plecto does not access customer dashboards without written consent.