Sales Recruiting Blog

Reducing Sales Force Turnover

Over time I am going to devote alot of attention to the subject of how to reduce turnover amongst your sales force.  I have a client that was averaging 30% turnover with their new sales hires and we were able to reduce that to below 10% annually.  In fact, at this point, we have placed 48 sales reps going back over 3 years and 41 of those are still with my client.  Some of how we have accomplished this is quantifiable and some of it art.  In my opinion, fully half of the reduction can be traced to one factor - expectations.

Having listened to thousands of sales reps explain why they have or want to leave a position I realized that nothing upsets sales reps more than making them promises that aren’t kept.  When developing your talk track about the sales job that you are hiring for it is imperative to live by the rule of under promising and over delivering.  My client and I write out and give to our potential sales candidates all relevant facts and expectations that would be of interest to them.  This includes - activity levels required to exceed sales quotas, comp plan and how it works, earnings histories of current sales reps, potential challenges in the position, growth plans for the company and growth history, etc.  I can imagine that many a sales manager after reading this is thinking that they don’t have a compelling story to tell.  That is the subject of another article.