5 Steps to Stop Your Sales Reps Leaving

Growing revenue requires engaged and motivated sellers but many have lost patience with management and are jumping ship.

Record numbers of reps are leaving for roles that offer more flexibility and control over their physical location and portfolio of work. Right now in Silicon Valley, it’s not unusual for firms to lose 25% or more of their sellers every quarter.

The financial consequences of this talent crisis can be severe. A 5% increase in sales rep attrition can increase selling costs by as much as 6%, and reduce revenue attainment by 3%. The companies most at risk are those with low growth and small margins - for them any increase in churn can ruin revenue plans.

Hiring and keeping great sales people is complex, and there are dozens of potential points of failure as candidates are recruited, onboarded and introduced to customers. The switch to remote and hybrid working has made every step of this journey more difficult for HR managers and sales leaders, resulting in reduced employee engagement and increased attrition rates.

Business leaders who want lower levels of staff turnover, will need to change the way their organisations manage sales talent. The five steps below can help transform an ad hoc approach to retention into a robust business process that prevents sales staff from leaving.

1. Take a holistic approach to talent management

Attracting, recruiting, ramping and retaining staff is a complex business challenge. It requires a huge amount of cross-functional collaboration from disparate business units including operations, training, management and human resources.

Getting the right people together, at the right time is tough - often because there isn’t a clear owner for the process - which leads to ambiguity and sub-optimal results. To be successful, companies need to foster better teamwork across the whole organisation and encourage resourceful leaders to work together.

As the accountability for revenue-generation broadens to include more staff in account management and customer services, these functions should take greater responsibility during onboarding and personal development.

Technology can enable better collaboration and 84% of employers are set to rapidly digitise working processes. As this change accelerates, new skills will be needed and it's anticipated that 50% of the global workforce need to reskill by 2025.

2. Create a culture of sustainable performance

Sales reps are increasingly overworked and dissatisfied, with 73% rating selling as “highly stressful”. To change this, companies will need to offer sellers a better balance of the type of work they do, and their personal workload.

To avoid rep burnout and churn, sales organisations will need to balance employee engagement and sales success, with productivity and revenue maximisation.

Technology can help build sustainable performance in sales teams and significantly improve business outcomes. Algorithms are already capable of recommending training modules, identifying which material to share with buyers, and who to call next. Only 39% of reps say their managers effectively use technology to coach, and ambitious sales leaders must harness this capability if they are to remain competitive.

Integrating sales technology into daily workflows can increase sales productivity by automating repetitive tasks and enabling better communication with buyers. All of which can help to create a culture of sustainable performance.

3. Reimagine onboarding and get reps ready quicker

Hybrid onboarding is leaving new sales hires unengaged and not “getting it” quickly enough. A major factor is that managers don’t have the resources to provide the virtual one-on-one support needed to help joiners figure out how to apply training to actual work scenarios.

In this new world, educating new starters using traditional learning methods leaves them with little ability to practically apply new skills. As a result, new hires are activated before they’re ready, increasing customer and employee frustration. Almost half of learning leaders reported a decline in training effectiveness in 2020 and many companies have targeted increased employee engagement in 2021.

To properly prepare new sellers, they should be offered learning that works for them. Research indicates employees enjoy self-paced and remote training, and recognize the impact on their performance. Automation and AI can improve individual performance and team effectiveness by preparing reps quicker - with the right knowledge and resources - for every customer interaction.

4. Provide constant growth opportunities

Growth is a key driver of retention: 45% of employees would stay with their current company if they were offered more skills and training.

Traditional methods of learning aren’t compatible with new working practises, and 66% of workers expect learning and development to happen outside the classroom. Microlearning is a powerful alternative that aids the retention of new information. This approach delivers bitesize units of knowledge - each with a single learning objective - that can be consumed in a short amount of time.

Remote working has negatively affected personal development, and face-to-face learning, coaching and mentoring are harder to coordinate now. Even before the switch to hybrid working, sales managers were only able to personally coach a limited number of reps. Automated sales coaching dramatically expands the capacity of these managers to coach reps and guide them to create better outcomes for buyers.

Sales technology can deliver practical training and coaching that can be applied immediately. In turn, new starters are better empowered to be job-ready salespeople.

5. Harness data to generate insights and make decisions

Organisations are twice as likely to significantly exceed business goals, when they have a strong cultural orientation to data-driven insights and decision-making. This 2019 finding by Deloitte clarifies what many successful companies already know: those who commit to data-driven decisions are racing ahead, while those fuelled by intuition or one-off experiences are falling behind.

Sales leaders must take advantage of technology platforms that use data to connect customer outcomes to the effectiveness of learning recommendations. The performance of sales reps should be measured against their behaviours following human and automated coaching sessions. Sales managers should have access to real-time insights that help them tailor support for every member of their team.

Collecting the right data can power sales readiness platforms that support day-to-day selling by surfacing enablement content at the right time and delivering next-best-action recommendations. Combining this operational data with employee satisfaction will give sales leaders a fuller picture of the real-time levels of engagement and motivation within their sales teams.

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Adopting these five steps can dramatically improve the speed of ramping sales reps; raise the overall level of readiness and skill across the entire revenue team; and reduce churn among talent capable of performing at a high level.

Ultimately, the biggest impact on revenue growth is employee satisfaction. If you can keep your best sellers - and keep them happy - you can create more value and customer success.

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Skydiving photo by Kamil Pietrzak on Unsplash