Sales team turnover: why reps leave and what to do about it.

Every owner with a sales team asks the same question sooner or later. My best rep is getting offers. Do I keep investing in him knowing he could leave any day?

The answer depends on how you hire, what you've built around the seat and how you think about the people who leave.

Hiring for volume

If you run an entry level, high volume sales team, like a door to door program or a roofing company that's always adding reps, turnover is part of the model. Doug ran that model for years. At one point he was hiring about as many reps each month as he was losing, just to hold headcount.

You won't get turnover to zero there. You can move it. These are the levers that moved it most.

• Tell the truth early. Right after the opportunity meeting, the manager sat down with each new hire and described the job honestly: the heat, the doors that never open, even the loose dogs in the neighborhood. People who weren't going to last left before a trainer spent a week on them.
• Create competition and purpose outside of pay. The team built an internal sales league with teams, mascots, weekly matchups and playoffs. Retention went up while it ran.
• Get money in their pocket faster. Most new reps who quit did it between their first and fifth sale. Spreading the fifth sale bonus across sales two, three and four got them paid sooner.
• Pay more for early referrals. New hires who referred a friend in their first two weeks earned double the referral bonus. A rep with a friend on the team is in it together and less likely to quit on a bad day.

Creating competition, creating value and creating purpose outside of their compensation is how you're going to move that needle for higher retention.

Doug Mitchell, Building Great Sales Teams

Hiring for quality

For experienced reps and leadership seats, hire slow and fire fast. Hiring slow means a process that screens people out before they ever reach a manager.

• Knockout questions on the application. About half of applicants won't answer them. That's useful information.
• A behavioral assessment compared against the profile of the people already winning in the seat.
• A 30 minute virtual first round, run from a set list of questions with notes captured for every candidate.
• A second round with the finalists only, so leadership time goes where it counts.

When you hire this way, more people stay and more of them are worth keeping.

What actually prevents turnover

Culture does, and culture starts with core values. Putting them on the wall is easy. Following through when someone breaks one is what makes the team believe them. Your people are watching to see if you'll act.

Next is an opportunity structure that's open to everyone and based on results. Make a set number of sales and you move from trainee to rep. Hit the next bar and you can train others. Everyone can see the ladder and what it takes to climb it.

The last piece is investing in people beyond their paycheck. Doug's teams brought in speakers on taxes, money, investing, health and mindset, recorded the sessions and made them part of the path to the next level.

When a key player leaves

If a top performer stops returning calls one day, look in the mirror first. Talk to the people who worked for them, beside them and above them. Somewhere along the way they were airing grievances. Find out what they were.

Then make it a system. Every time someone leaves, their manager fills out an offboarding form with the reason. Pull the last 20 forms and the trends show up on their own. Fix those, and turnover drops.

Did you get your return?

Even a great program loses people. When it happens, look at the hire as an investment. What did you pay them, and what gross profit did their sales produce? If your comp plan is built right, you almost always got your return. They profited from the relationship and so did you.

Keep the relationship, too. People leave and come back years later. People leave and go do great things that were never going to happen inside your company. Tell those stories in your opportunity meetings. It's okay for someone to learn a skill with you and move on.

Build the position, not the person

You built out the position. You didn't build out the person.

Doug Mitchell, Building Great Sales Teams

If a seat only works because of who's in it, you're in trouble the day they leave. Write the scope of work, the SOPs and the profile for every seat, and tie them to the opportunity structure. Then people can move up or move on without the business stalling.

Doug's bet is on homegrown leaders over lateral hires every time. People who came up through your company tend to stay longer and return more. Lateral hires bring real value, but expect some of them to be with you for a season.

When they leave for more money

When a rep says a competitor offered more and asks what you'll do about it, the answer is nothing. What you pay is what you pay, and the opportunity structure was there when they started. Give a commission bump to keep one rep and you'll be in the same spot a few months later with the next one. Don't let anyone hold you hostage on commission.

And if someone leaves badly, takes people with them or talks about your company on the way out, let it go. Defending yourself costs more than they ever could.

How we do it at Ballast

Every Ballast search runs the quality process above. Every candidate answers knockout questions and takes a Crew Fuel behavioral and cognitive assessment, and we run a recorded first round interview before you spend a minute. We also write the role outline, SOPs and scorecard for the seat, plus the knockout questions, and you keep all of it. See how a search runs.

Adapted from Building Great Sales Teams, #ThePlaybook 7. Quotes are lightly edited for reading.