It’s no secret that turnover represents a serious budgetary expense for corporations and companies of all sizes. Losing staff means operating at less than full capacity, and the time it takes to hire and train new personnel is time not being spent serving customers or developing the talent you already have.
Sales departments are particularly prone to turnover due to the intense and stressful nature of the work, and sales turnover is a critical liability in many companies. While there are many factors that lead to turnover in sales, here are three concrete things you can do to transform your retention rates and build a more stable salesforce.
1. Hire Smarter
In many companies, chronic turnover rates have both led to and fueled an unhealthy attitude toward employment. Why invest in hiring the best candidates when they’re just going to leave in a few months?
But the truth is that better hiring processes can curb turnover rates significantly. When you make sure that your sales division is staffed by career salespeople who are committed to the work and are in the industry for the long haul, you’re much less likely to see burnout.
One of the best ways to do this is by working with Toronto sales recruiters who can help you find the right personnel. Whether you’re trying to find rank-and-file reps or high-powered executives, the evidence has shown that recruiters build winning teams that stick around.
2. Create a Better Incentive Structure
No one wants to work in an organization where they feel their skills are not appreciated and rewarded, so the most effective way to reduce turnover is to provide your workers with incentives to stick around.
Namely, you may want to consider expanding your compensation to include things like:
- Stock options
- Flex time
- End-of-year bonuses
- Expanded holidays
These benefits may involve increasing your human resources budget, but better compensation will pay off in terms of better performance and less time wasted hiring and training new salespeople.
3. Provide More Robust Training
One of the leading causes of employee turnover in the sales department is a lack of support during the onboarding process. Especially when dealing with inexperienced or early-career sales reps, you need to provide the tools for success and teach concrete strategies for dealing with the rejections that are a daily part of life on a sales team.
Putting more thought and energy into training and actually teaching the vital soft skills that make such a difference in sales performance will help give your employees confidence to do their work well, and will also make them more loyal to their manager and team.
Due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the world economy, 2020 may ultimately see significant declines in turnover rates. After all, no one wants to leave their job in a recession.
But that’s no reason for sales managers to get complacent. As things stabilize and business-as-usual returns, those turnover rates are going to go back up. In the meantime, companies should explore new strategies for reducing turnover so they can come out of the pandemic stronger than ever.
