Retaining Top Sales Talent
Tips to avoid losing your “A Team”
Many enterprise sales teams operate on the 80:20 rule – 80% of your new revenue comes from the top 20% of your team. Losing a great salesperson can be painfully expensive – your superstars walk out the door not just with their skills, but with their contacts, relationships and years of know-how.
Retaining your top performers is often the single most important part of talent management.
Sometimes you lose a “star” to another company’s offer out of the blue that is just so great that you can’t compete, and your star just can’t say no (Even though you probably hate losing them, there’s often a pretty nice feeling when someone you’ve coached goes on to something really great).
But as a sales leader, most of your top performers leave for reasons that you have control of.
Here are a few simple steps you can take to reduce sales churn and keep more of your best performers.
Teach your front-line managers to coach
Front-line managers are often your weakest link. Most front-line sales managers are promoted into the role because they were great salespeople. But there is a massive difference between the skills of a “super-rep” and those of a leader. Coaching is a skill, just like selling, yet most sales management training is quite theoretical, and focuses overwhelmingly on pipeline management and forecasting, with little on how to manage people.
A large Gallup poll concluded that three-quarters of people who voluntarily quit jobs do so because of their immediate boss or supervisor. If losing good salespeople becomes a pattern, you need to understand the source.
Experienced, capable salespeople become bored very quickly when they are treated the same way as the new hires and the “mid-pack”. And bored top performers leave for something more interesting.
The best managers build up a simple picture of the competencies and gaps for each member of their team, and adapt their leadership style to the different needs, dreams and capabilities of each person. In the same way you would segment your customers, they segment their team and adapt their leadership style to suit.
This delivers two benefits – a better relationship between the manager and their team, and higher productivity (and hence earnings) for the team.
Losing a great salesperson can be painfully expensive – your superstars walk out the door not just with their skills, but with their contacts, relationships and years of know-how.
Here’s a simple segmentation framework for managers:
- TEACH – New hires and underperformers will generally need a “show and tell” style. (Think of the 80’s movie “Karate Kid” – paint the fence, wash the car). This style of leadership should be short-term – it gets old very quickly. Unfortunately, many poor managers never graduate past this style of leadership.
- COACH – This questioning style is the best approach for the “middle class” – mid-performing salespeople who are good but not great. A teach/tell style here is often counterproductive. These reps represent the biggest growth opportunity on a “revenue per rep” basis, and this is where many “super-rep” managers really struggle.
- MOTIVATE – Your superstars need very little coaching, and they hate being told how to do their job (they often know more about selling than their manager does). Managers need to understand what motivates these people. Leaders can then focus on just three things for their top performers – giving them challenging stretch goals, clearing obstacles to their success, and then (as far as possible), letting them get on with it.
“People leave bosses, not companies”
Give your managers the training and the tools to equip them to segment their team, adapt their leadership style and succeed.
Package remuneration smartly
As a general rule, the more you pay a salesperson, the less likely they are to leave. And clearly if your top performers feel underpaid, you’re introducing significant risk. Go talk to your CFO.
But beyond the size of their remuneration, which may be only partly in your control, think about the shape of it. In other words, how it is packaged. One of the most common mistakes we see is that the difference in total remuneration between top and middle performers isn’t large enough.
This varies by role, of course, but a “superstar” enterprise rep who brings in 3x the revenue of every other rep should be earning dramatically more than the rest. Reward great performance generously. We favor progressive commissions – the more you sell, the more your rate of commission increases.
The other mistake we see is capped commissions. Do not cap total remuneration – there is always another deal out there, and you want your highest performers chasing every one of them down, not sandbagging. A VP Sales writing a large commission check to a high performer should be one of the most rewarding things for the VP to do – even if it means that the rep earns more than the VP!!
Understand non-financial motivators
Many (most?) top salespeople are “coin-operated” – that is, if you put a coin in, they will work. In many ways, this makes them the easiest salespeople to lead – figure out a way for them to earn a lot of money, and they’ll be happy.
But even the most coin-operated rep has other needs and interests. Some inside salespeople want to get out in the field. Some mid-market reps want to sell bigger, more complex deals into the enterprise. Some enterprise reps want to lead a team – others actively want to avoid this. Some want less travel, some want more recognition. You get the idea.
Their immediate manager should always know what those interests are – and be seeking to find ways to provide it to them. If a sales rep wants a path into a leadership position but that isn’t available right now, their manager can get them coaching others on the team to help them build that muscle and move in that direction. Show them a path to where they want to go.
Again, a lot of it comes right back to your front line managers. Invest in them with the right training and tools, and you’ll get both higher productivity and lower churn.
Good selling!
