High employee turnover is harmful to any business but when your sales team is affected by turnover, the consequences can be severe.
With every sales rep who quits or is terminated, your business loses valuable knowledge and experience and the morale and confidence of your remaining sales staff takes a direct hit. You may feel like the answer to these problems lies in attracting and hiring more sales reps and to an extent it does. But don’t forget to examine how to retain employees–specifically, your best employees–for continued sales growth.
How to Retain Employees (and Why They’re Leaving)
Here are 5 reasons why your best sales reps might be quitting or why some are getting fired. Best of all, learn how you can stop the exodus at the source:
Reason 1: They can’t rely on a set sales process
Does your team know what’s working? And if it is working, how will they know? If you give them a sustainable, repeatable sales process that everyone can use they’ll know exactly what’s working and what’s not. Don’t forget to track and measure its success and adjust your process as new results come in.
Reason 2: They don’t have access to the right tools
Sharing results is important for sales reps to understand how they can improve. But once you’ve shared results, are you also providing your team with the tools they need to get better results? Sales enablement tools, like HubSpot, fit seamlessly into your sales process and allow your sales team to track and measure their results so they can improve. At Tangible Words we like to give every sales rep a dashboard they can check every day to see how their month is tracking and how they compare to their peers.
Reason 3: They spend 68% of their time on administrative tasks
Sales reps lose 68% of their working time on administration. That’s two-thirds of their day that they’re not doing the thing they were hired for: selling. When you give them sales enablement tools and tools like Hubspot that automatically track their time and remove administrative tasks, they can spend more time doing their actual job.
Don’t forget to ensure your sales reps have a modern CRM that helps them avoid manual data entry. Try Hubspot’s Forever Free CRM - it tracks client interactions on email automatically and scraping the internet for data instead of typing it. Say “goodbye” to all the CRM Adoption issues you had before when reps see how much FASTER they can work on Hubspot. (By the way, did you know we have a free training course on this?)
Reason 4: They don’t have clear objectives
Does your sales team know who to call and how to spend their time each day? Sales reps might leave if they’re fed up with a lack of success in their personal sales goals. Helping your reps to set objectives and key results (OKRs) as a team gives them clear and measurable objectives. (Yup, and of course you can track these and how they are tracking towards their goals via their metrics or deals count on Hubspot’s free CRM. Obvs!).
Reason 5: They don’t fit with the company culture
In this case, their role or expectations might not have been clear from the start. Make your company culture clear from the outset to eliminate confusion. Use social media to promote what you do and who you work with. Make culture clear in your job descriptions by answering the following questions:
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What are you really like as an organization culturally?
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What do you value?
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What do you promote?
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Is your career pathway an up or out model?
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What types of people do well in your culture?
In this age of short talent supply through low unemployment and low participation rates in Canada, workers are able to be picky. You’d be surprised how much your social media presence matters to Millennial and younger job seekers. If you want to be competitive you have to show your future workforce that you are competitive - and other companies are doing an awesome job communicating brand on social platforms. If you aren’t - book time with a workforce development consultant at Tangible Words to brainstorm how you could start improving your digital presence to attract your industry’s top sales guns.
It’s easy to react to the immediate sales data you have. Changing strategies without the right data to back up those changes can affect your staff retention rates. But when you employ sales tracking and set a strategy with measurable outcomes, you can track your results quarterly and modify as needed. This process removes the need for on the fly changes and gives your sales reps clear outcomes and a path to follow.
Once you know how to retain employees you can move on to the next step: filling their pipeline with more, high-quality leads.
Get the Best ROI On Your Sales Growth Strategy
Want to learn more about how your business can achieve sales growth? Download this e-book to learn how to build out your revenue generation plan for free and an efficient marketing strategy to keep your sales teams’ pipeline full.
