National Sales Center

Ways To Retain Sales Reps

I’ve seen too many sales organizations fall apart due to high sales rep employee turnover. First, let’s look at the damage sales rep turnover causes and then let’s look at ways to retain sales reps.

Damage Caused By High Sales Rep Turnover

You want salespeople working in a highly motivated environment. One sure way to crush that motivation is by having a high sales rep turnover rate. Who wants to work in an office with a revolving door? However, let’s not overlook one important point. When In talk about ways to retain sales reps, I’m talking about ways to retain “good” sales reps.

Customer retention is tied to sales rep retention. Salespeople build relationships with their clients and those relationships are key to account retention. Clients don’t like being assigned a new sales rep every year. Also, there is always the danger that the account may move their business to their former sales rep’s new employer. Although it may not be a problem in this economy, It’s just good business to retain sales reps.

Another reason to retain sales reps is that it takes time to recruit and hire a new sales rep. Also, it takes time for new sales reps to get up to speed and become productive. Obviously, these factors will put a dent in productivity and in the end, the new rep may never be as productive as the rep they replaced.

High sales rep employee turnover will damage a business so it must be controlled. Let’s now look at ways to minimize both voluntary and non-voluntary sales rep turnover as well as ways to retain sales reps.

Voluntary Sales Rep Turnover

You can control voluntary sales rep turnover by understanding the factors that cause sales reps to quit. Pay attention to the following conditions and you’ll lower your voluntary sales rep turnover rate. Use this as a map to help you retain sales reps.

• Changes in the commission structure
• Changes in management
• Unfair account and territory assignments
• Lack of recognition and appreciation
• Lack of career advancement opportunities
• Changes in corporate direction
• Price increases
• New products introduced by the competition
• Reduced sales support

All of the above can lead to a high voluntary sales rep turnover rate. Also note that the above-mentioned conditions involve “change”. Sales organizations must remember that “change” must be managed if they expect to retain good sales reps.

Non-Voluntary Sales Employee Turnover

It would be nice to have a “No man left behind” attitude but there are times when the best, if not the only appropriate action is termination. That said, far too many sales organizations use termination as a first response to underperformance. They fail to understand that you can turnaround an underperforming sales rep and by doing so, lower their sales rep turnover rate.

The way to manage a sales rep that is not performing starts by understanding why that salesperson is not performing. This is the basis of an Employee Retention Strategy. A sales rep that is not performing is simply not doing something that successful reps do every day. All to often, it has nothing to do with effort and everything to do with skills. As I mentioned, any piece about ways to retain sales reps is truly about ways to retain GOOD sales reps!

Employee development is critical to employee retention. If your goal is to retain sales reps, you need to focus on ongoing development through sales training. Sales training should not be a one time yearly event. Instead, sales skills should be at the center of a sales team’s culture. That’s how to grow your business.

How To Retain Sales Reps

My advice is to manage sales rep retention and reduce employee turnover by giving sales reps the tools they need to succeed in sales. You do that by improving their sales skills and making employee development part of your overall sales rep retention strategy. That’s how to retain sales reps!

Make it a great day!

Nick Moreno, Sales Consultant

Tags: sales rep retention, sales rep turnover