The Climb: how it works
The Climb is the one game with no opponent. Every rep climbs the same five-milestone track by hitting cumulative milestones over the season — it’s you versus the track, at your own pace. It exists for a specific reason: leaderboards motivate the reps near the top and quietly demoralize everyone else. On The Climb, a rep in last place on every other board can still level up this week, in public.
01The board in one look
Left: your track — your level, your progress bar to the next one, and five rung nodes showing what each takes and whether it's cleared. Right: the team ladder, every rep ranked by level.
02Five milestones, any order
Each rung is a cumulative season milestone on one behavior, and every rung clears independently the moment its own threshold is met — there's no required order. Your level is simply how many you've cleared (0–5), so a closer who's booked every deal but barely touched the phone still levels up on deals and points while dials sits untouched:
- Volume Your volume activity (dials, doors, calls) — clears at 25% of the season target.
- Quality touch Your quality touch (convos, demos) — clears at 35% of the season target.
- Milestone Your milestone metric (meetings, proposals) — clears at 50% of the season target.
- Wins Wins (deals closed) — clears at 50% of the season target.
- Points Total season points — clears at 75% of the season target.
The thresholds are derived from your team’s own targets: each rung clears at a fraction of the full-season target for that metric, ramping from an early win (the lightest rung lands in the first weeks) to a real season-scale achievement (total points, the heaviest). The metric names follow whatever your manager called them — a canvassing team climbs on doors, an AE team on demos.
03Levels are earned facts
Three promises make the track trustworthy:
- A cleared level never un-clears. The moment you reach a new level, it’s written to the record. If a later data correction lowers your totals — even one that un-clears the specific rung that got you there — your level stands; it was true when you earned it.
- Every level pays, by COUNT. The 1st rung you clear — whichever one it is — mints a Grit Coin bonus and a cosmetic; the 5th mints the biggest bonus and the OPERATOR title. The reward is about how many you've banked, never about which specific rung got you there:
- 1st rung cleared NAMEPLATE + 5 GC.
- 2nd rung cleared AVATAR FRAME + 5 GC.
- 3rd rung cleared BOARD BANNER + 10 GC.
- 4th rung cleared VOLT TRAIL + 10 GC.
- 5th rung cleared TITLE: OPERATOR + 20 GC.
Level-ups are public. They land in the board’s level-up feed, and if your team’s Slack is connected, the channel hears about it too.
04The team ladder
The ladder ranks the roster by level, with each rep’s progress toward the next. For a manager it reads differently than a leaderboard: it’s not who’s biggest, it’s who’s moving. A rep sitting at LV 0 for weeks is a coaching conversation the points standings would have hidden.
05Setup and common questions
There’s nothing to configure. The track derives itself from the weekly targets and season length you already set in Game settings. Changing targets re-derives the remaining thresholds; levels already earned stand.
“I’m crushing meetings and deals — why aren’t I higher?” Your level is the count of rungs you’ve cleared, not which ones. If dials and convos are still short, those two rungs are still open — clear them (in any order) and your level climbs the same as anyone else’s.
“My numbers got corrected downward — did I lose my level?” No. Cleared levels are frozen. Only your progress toward the next level moves with the live numbers.
“What do the unlocks actually do?” The Grit Coin bonus is spendable in the Store like any other GC. The cosmetics are bragging rights on the boards — earned, visible, and impossible to buy.
More questions? Write to hello@gritboard.io — a human reads it. Curious what the game feels like? See the Climb overview.