Currently, more than 2 million sales positions are open in the U.S. In addition, 40% of presently employed sales reps plan to leave their jobs within the next two years. It's no wonder that attracting and retaining top talent is never far from the minds of BevAlc sales managers.
However, your management team can take steps to ensure you have a sales culture that brings top talent to you. When your organization invests in its sales team, turnover decreases, and performance, engagement, and sales increase. Reducing turnover helps foster long-term customer relationships that offer more innovative solutions to their most pressing problems. In this blog, we'll discuss what causes salesperson turnover and how to prevent it with the tenets of the Fox Selling System.
What Causes Salesperson Turnover?
We've boiled down the top reasons for salesperson turnover to the 5 P's: people, process, products, performance, and pay. Let's look at each one in more detail.
1. People
First and foremost, your business wouldn't exist without the people that keep it running. Everyone from the top manager to the people in front of the customers is vital to your success. Another critical factor in employee engagement is their rapport with their managers. According to LinkedIn, between 60% and 80% of salespeople state their reason for leaving is having no connection with management or incompetent leadership.
2. Process
The sales process keeps your sales team working at peak efficiency or brings progress to a halt. Manual processes, overly complicated procedures, and hours of administrative work on top of sales and customer interaction hours are a recipe for burnout. Ensure you set your team up for success with a sales process that easily qualifies leads and provides the tools, techniques, and technology to service their customer accounts efficiently.
3. Products
Even the best products can sit on shelves if they aren't the right ones for the customer's traffic. Product placement is also crucial. A cluttered store that doesn't have prominently displayed specials can also miss out on sales. A comprehensive learning and development program along with expert coaching helps your sales reps learn how to address client pain points such as slow-moving inventory by assessing the location, customer demographics, and other factors that could be standing in the way of sales.
4. Performance
Performance for each salesperson can be based on a variety of metrics. Establishing structured coaching sessions that utilize historical performance data helps measure progress toward goals, gives talking points for improvement, and leads to consistent, predictable, and repeatable results. When the sales reps can see quantifiable evidence of their successes or where they are missing the mark, they are more engaged in their development. Having a career progression plan that shows when and how they can achieve their goals and where they are on their progress keeps them motivated.
5. Pay
The earlier referenced LinkedIn article also mentions a SiriusDecisions study that revealed that 89% of top-performing salespeople who leave their jobs do so because of insufficient pay. Ensure you regularly review your commissions, incentives, and compensation plans and compare them to industry standards. Give your salespeople a way to visualize their advancement opportunities based on their performance.
5 Ways Fox Selling System Helps With Salesperson Retention
Fox Selling System has a successful history of transforming the performance of BevAlc sales organizations with their learning and development curriculum, sales enablement solutions, and performance assessment tools. Start retaining your top talent and attracting that of your competition with our 5 Steps to Success.
1. Online on-demand and interactive training
- Profits Sales Process Course
- Goals and Rise Sales Coaching & Leadership Course
- Key Account Leadership Course
- Library of Category Management Courses
2. Live virtual training sessions with Tom Fox
- 100 hours of virtual training, including 30 Live, 2-4 Hour training seminars twice per year targeted for:
- Sales coaching & leadership
- Sales process for sales reps
- Key account leaders
3. Selling skills assessment tool
- Provides metrics for measuring individuals, teams, and organizational performance against specific job requirements
- Enable career path planning
4. Coaching scorecard tool:
- Streamlines digital documentation of work-withs, including observation notes on selling behaviors and techniques that can be tracked in real-time dashboards on the Fox Selling System portal
5. Sell sheet generator tool:
- Allows sales reps to create fact-based visual scenario sheets with profitability forecasts
Transform Your Sales Culture With Fox Selling System
Attracting top talent is only one step toward creating a high-performing BevAlc sales team. Approximately 70% of salespeople are willing to change jobs to go to a company that has a continuous learning culture. Make your team poach-proof from your competition by investing in their success with the coaching, on-demand learning, sales enablement tools, and performance management techniques that help them reach their potential.
