Five Strategies to Keep Your Sales Team Engaged and Reduce Turnover
Engaged Salespeople Achieve More
With turnover costing more than you’d ever want to calculate, it’s no secret that keeping top salespeople engaged supports consistent performance over time.
Consider the following strategies when leading your sales team, especially when working with a software sales recruiter.
Strategy #1: Top salespeople need challenges.
Achievers look for new challenges and tend to stay where their role continues to expand. In practice, this often means stretching into new responsibilities, exploring new territory, or working through more complex problems.
When that progression slows, engagement tends to drop, which can lead to shorter tenure.
They will remain with an organization where they can stay engaged and immersed in activities just beyond their current capabilities. (For more insight, check out The Talent Code, Greatness isn’t Born It’s Grown by Daniel Coyle.)
Strategy #2: Understand the drivers that motivate your salespeople.
Current research concludes that Gen X and Gen Y are more likely to need praise than prior generations.
Executive leadership must create opportunities for skill development and structure how onboarding is handled, which often shapes retention outcomes. When those factors are unclear or misaligned, retention tends to suffer.
Here are the most common motivators for sales professionals: compensation, public recognition, incentives, purpose, autonomy to make decisions and leadership/skill development.
Strategy #3: Empower top sales performers.
Including top sales reps in decision-making and acting on their input often increases their level of engagement.
When reps are involved in shaping policy or influencing change, they tend to feel more connected to the outcome. That connection often contributes to longer tenure and more consistent performance.
Strategy #4: The strength of consistent communication.
One of the top complaints of many sales reps is their lack of accessibility to their sales manager. Unreturned phone calls and emails don’t go unnoticed. Your rep might not confront you directly, but they notice the behavior.
When engagement from leadership drops, reps can become less connected to the team’s direction.
Competing priorities can push reps down the list, but repeated delays in communication can lead to disengagement and, over time, departures that might have been avoided.
Strategy #5: Set a higher standard for the group.
Be willing to exemplify the behavior you want your sales team to embrace.
Teams that maintain consistent expectations around performance and accountability tend to operate more steadily over time.
Hiring and developing a group of high performers raises the overall level of execution. In those environments, strong contributors are more likely to stay, as expectations are clear and performance is consistent across the team.
Surrounding your great reps with other ambitious sales pros eager to bring in new business, sends a clear message to everyone: “Get after it, hurry..hurry.”
