Rising turnover isn't breaking stride. And this turnover costs a lot of money, especially when it comes to salespeople. Figuring out how to retain sales employees is top of mind these days.  

And it’s no wonder why.

It's rare that a product is so brilliant it sells itself. Top sales personnel do a good deal of the heavy lifting; they're instrumental to a company's success. So it makes sense to worry that your best sales talent might leave. 

At Praisidio, we know a thing or two about using data-driven strategies to retain employees. In this article, we show you seven strategies to retain your sales employees, including tips for using talent intelligence to proactively identify those employees most at-risk of leaving.

How do you retain a salesperson? 7 strategies

The sales industry is challenging by nature, but that doesn't mean there aren't ways to retain your sales employees. Let's look at seven of the most effective strategies. 

1. Identify problems early with talent Intelligence

At the end of the day, we're dealing with humans. For your best chance of success, your retention strategies should be tailored to the individual needs of your sales team. 

For some sales employees, pay and bonuses might be the sole driving factor keeping them at your company. But for others, career growth, recognition, or connection to the larger mission might factor in as well. 

Talent intelligence helps you take all of these factors into account, on an employee-by-employee basis, even if you have a large sales team. 

A talent intelligent platform like Praisidio takes the human resources data you already have on hand and uses it to proactively identify sales employees most at risk of attrition. You’ll get a clear picture of where to focus your employee retention efforts, as well as targeted retention strategies for each at-risk employee. 

Talent intelligence transforms hopeful stabs in the dark into educated decisions that make a real difference for sales employee retention. 

Learn more about how Praisidio can help you retain your sales employees. 

2. Invest in employees 

 If you want your sales employees to invest emotionally in your company’s shared future, you need to invest in them first. If you want them to stay at your company, loyal and inspired, give them something to be loyal to and excited about (beyond a paycheck). 

Investing in your sales team through training and development is a great gesture of loyalty. It shows you are willing to buy into their long term future. It also proves that growth, development, and exciting new prospects are on their horizon if they stay with you. 

3. Develop talent and promote internally

Nurturing talent, and creating a clear path to internal promotion, is a big part of how to retain sales employees. 

If your sales employees can visualize a bright future at your company, it helps keep them from stagnating in their current roles. Above and beyond this, developing your employees also means you have a trained-and-ready pool to hire from when new positions open up. 

A survey by Harvard Business Review revealed lack of promotion opportunities caused 70% of high-performing sales reps to leave their current company in search of better opportunities.

The converse is also true. High performers got to where they are because they are hungry to grow, so if you build a culture tailored for you high-performers to flourish, the right people will stay. 

4. Focus on mental health 

Sales reps show up each day to rigid success metrics and the sting of rejection. While resilience in the face of challenge is a great skill to develop, we're humans and at the end of the day, rejection bites. 

Yet working under this toll is the norm for a lot of employees and decreasing the mental load is a big part of how to keep your sales team around. Low mental health numbers have a strong link to high sales force turnover statistics and poor performance metrics.

Something as simple as feeling supported by management increases the number of sales reps who indicate good mental health from 15% to 68%.

Beyond this, mental health among sales employees goes up when people feel able to: 

• Set clear boundaries between work and life
• Make a positive contribution to the world 
• Show up with clarity and direction 
• Feel connected to their colleagues 
• Reach their goals and metrics 
• Communicate honestly how they are feeling about their work 
• Leave at the end of the day knowing they have job security  

5. Hire people who believe in your product

To increase retention, make sure you're hiring the right people in the first place. From a Harris Poll survey of people who took on a new job, 66% soon realized it was the wrong fit. In less than 6 months, half of them had quit.

Finding the right people starts off with a clear definition going into the interview process: who do you want? How do they fit into your culture? 

Look for people who care about what you're selling. If your product, mission, and values align with them, they will be connected to a greater sense of meaning. This is crucial for employee retention in any field. 

Plus, if your sales employees believe in your product's value, their selling will be more compelling.

And be transparent and honest when it comes to what they're signing up for. The sooner they know what they're in for, the sooner they can decide if they want it. Sugar coating will just cost you more time figuring out if someone is the right fit. 

6. Look beyond the pay scale

Since pay in the sales industry is typically performance-based, if you want to retain high-performing talent, your pay needs to be competitive enough to keep them.

A talent intelligence platform like Praisidio makes it easy to suss out pay imbalances by giving you an at-a-glance picture of employees who fall below average in terms of internal compa-ratio, external compa-ratio, and pay raises. 

However, pay is not a magic solve-all Band-Aid. Thriving at work under great leadership amongst engaged peers and a healthy, flourishing culture cannot be replaced by money. We're humans first and workers second. 

If you have bigger issues you're trying to cover with money — don't. Go straight to the source. This may take some hunting, collecting, and acting on feedback or using data analytics to give you some proper insight into how everyone is feeling. 

Acting on what you find will create a more sustainable employee retention plan than a pay rise. It's speculated that organizations spent $223 billion in 5 years on turnover due to culture alone.

7. Nurture the small wins 

Motivation is not an endless well you tap once and ignore the rest of the year. Motivation is something we need frequent top-ups of.

The sales industry is prone to highs and lows. Unfortunately, even on a good day, your reps can get hit with dopamine withdrawal in the aftermath of closing a deal. When the buzz wears off, it can have the effect of making previously happy baseline levels feel low.

So, even after a large sale, make sure you check in on your sales employees — massive highs and lows are not conducive to consistent productivity. Nurturing people daily on small wins is. 

This may look like taking the time to encourage daily effort or a good mindset, rather than just big celebrations after a big sale.

Sales force turnover statistics

Sales force turnover is almost triple that of other roles, and this rate is not slowing down. The industry is seeing a turnover rate increase of 58% from one year to the next.

But is this a death sentence for sales retention? 

The annual rate of turnover for high performing employees in all industries is only 3%. In the top companies, it's almost zero.

Getting to an almost zero turnover rate suggests that it's possible to build a stable workforce of high performers who want to thrive and grow at your company, regardless of the industry. 

These statistics also suggest that the companies that attract the high performers in the first place are also the ones that keep them. This means that despite the Great Resignation, it is possible to go against the trend of rising attrition and make your company into one where high performers come, and stay. 

Why is sales force turnover so high in the first place?

We're finally starting to clock how much of a toll stress takes on us. And we have built a world where it’s almost inescapable. 

In the sales industry though, the stress is on another level. Being a sales manager has been ranked as one of the most stressful jobs, and a full 67% of sales reps are close to burnout. 

Stress is often caused by feeling the need to control what is outside our control. When we're driving humans to meet (or exceed) aggressive, inflexible targets, it’s no wonder sales employees are highly stressed. 

And when meeting numbers dictates success, it leaves your reps to stew on the uncontrollable aspects of their job, rather than feel empowered to perform well on what is in their control. 

Two-thirds of sales reps face mental health struggles. Seeing stats like this, it’s really no wonder we're struggling with how to retain sales employees and all the problems that come with the high turnover of our sales force. 

Problems that come with high turnover of your sales force

During a tough economy, it's critical to preserve (and ideally grow) top-line revenue. Therefore, salesforce retention and productivity are key — especially when it comes to your highest performing sales employees. 

High turnover in the sales force causes issues like: 

• Excessive cost: It generally costs about 1.5x an employee’s annual salary to replace them. 
• Low morale: Seeing people leaving around you can cause turnover contagion, with employees leaving in waves. 
• Inability to maintain top-line revenue: If the majority of time and resources go into onboarding and training, it’s very difficult to get everyone functioning at their optimum. 
• Trouble attracting top performers: If high-performers see or hear about your high turnover, they may consider it a sign of poor culture and low employee satisfaction.

Manage sales force turnover with talent intelligence

Using talent intelligence to reduce your turnover is the most effective way to retain your sales employees. Praisidio collates all the data you already have and uses machine learning to identify at-risk employees and give you targeted retention and engagement solutions. 

This amounts to real-time visibility into what is happening for each of your employees. It allows you to meet their needs in an individual and timely manner. 

But we’ll let the numbers do the talking: Companies that use Praisidio’s talent intelligence platform commonly reduce employee attrition costs by as much as $10 million per 2,000 employees. 

Book a demo to see how Praisidio can help you retain employees across your entire company.