Turnover Above 20% is Killing Your Sales | Sales Strategies

Turnover, specifically sales turnover, hurts your business. How do I know this? Recently, I’ve been working with some clients who have suffered some devastatingly bad losses because of sales rep turnover.

In one case, a client had a great sales rep retire and because he had been managing huge multi-million dollar accounts on his own, those clients had no other relationships inside the organization. When he retired, he was replaced by another great salesperson, but the customer no longer felt any loyalty to the organization, so they went to another sales organization.

Another client is desperately trying to win back a customer that they previously lost a number of years ago because the company has said that, “Your turnover is too high. I’m sick of having a different person every single month do business with us.” Both of these companies are finding that they’re not accelerating their sales or their growth fast enough because of their sales rep turnover problem.

To give you a third example, a company is trying to hire thousands of sales reps worldwide to grow the business. They said, “Well, we got a turnover problem, but that’s just the nature of inside sales.”

[bctt tweet=”Recruiting new people isn’t going to solve your sales turnover problem. ” username=”EngageColleen”]

We do always need to be recruiting new people, but you have to address the culture of your organization. The company that’s trying to hire thousands of people worldwide doesn’t realize that it would be cheaper for them to double the salaries of the sales reps they already have and give them 8 weeks off a year to help build a culture in which people want to stay.

High turnover doesn’t need to happen. We have inside sales teams that work with us that have incredibly low turnover rates and very happy workers. Why? Because they have a great internal culture. Salespeople don’t just leave because of money, they leave because they feel their contributions aren’t being valued and they don’t see a career path at the organization they’re currently in.

If you have a turnover rate that’s higher than 20-25% inside your sales organization, you need to address the culture problem. When you recruit new people at a constant rate, your customers will notice very quickly and will be more likely to leave. Not only will you have the wasted expense of hiring new people, but you’ll have the added loss of your best customers and those customers will be talking about your instability in the marketplace.

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