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There is no domain as challenging and dynamic as sales. You will find sales professionals by the dozens but the truly exceptional ones are not only tough to hire, but also are hard to retain. Thankfully there are a few surprisingly simple things you can do as a business leader to help your sales management keep such talent engaged and thereby retain top sales talent. Here is a quick reckoner of active job seekers globally, by industry and function in the 3rd quarter of 2021 from Gartner.
Let’s consider some of the consequences of a top talent leaving your team. The impact can be systemic. Questions like, who will likely be a justified replacement of the top talent lost? Will you need to fish for another top sales talent? Should you be looking at hiring externally? How long will the hiring process take? How will this impact the team? How to keep the team engaged and motivated? It seems like an unending and cascading series of questions. Lets enumerate the likely impacts of a top sales talent leaving the team.
Team Morale
Your top sales rep is probably one of those who keeps your team in high spirits. Losing such a team member can bring down the team morale. Moreover this may trigger an exodus of sales reps.
Rehiring and retraining and rebuilding
You have to quickly find a replacement. The full cycle of rehiring, retraining and rebuilding is costly and time consuming.
Impact on Revenue
You will have to count-in the possible loss of revenue that your top sales rep used to bring in.
Risk of losing strategic plans to competition
Your top sales rep will typically have access to strategic sales plans. If your competitor bags your sales rep, you run the risk of losing out to your competition. So how do you retain top sales talent? Well the first and foremost aspect to look at is how you attract top talent, after all what attracts them in, is what will keep them as well. Attractive compensation plans, transparency and growth prospects are some of the key aspects that sales folks look at when joining any organization. Let’s take a look.
A competitive Compensation Plan
It is no surprise that a compensation plan is both the reason to attract top sales talent and the reason for them to leave for greener pastures. Your HR team should be in constant touch with prevalent competitive compensation plans in the market. You should be able to offer a top sales resource, just a cut above the rest to attract them to your business. Once you have got the talent pool, your HR team should be updated on the compensation plans on offer in the job market on a regular basis. This will help you stay ahead of the game and offer highly competitive compensation plans that can help retain top sales talent.
Clear and Transparent Incentive Plans
Transparency is another key to sales rep retention. Being transparent about changes in business and incentive plans, builds a much needed trust between sales leadership and the reps. Any new compensation plan rollout should be clear and transparent to avoid confusion among sales folks. A simplified compensation structure will help them have a clear vision of sales quotas and how to achieve them.
Clear Career Paths
Everybody wants to grow within an organization, more so for a top sales rep. An adequate training infrastructure, mentoring program and rewards and recognition programs will help you keep your best sales reps engaged. Engagement in both sales activities and self development will keep your sales folks interested. Sales leaders should be encouraged to actively look at helping them with their career goals. An active mentorship program will also keep them highly motivated and engaged. Lastly, sales managers and leaders have to keep a tab on how engaged their sales reps are. Study shows that sales reps are least engaged in sales activities just before they are ready to jump ships. A quick, transparent and efficient sales performance management system will help you in this direction. Invest in one that gives you and your rep easy access to sales performance dashboards, sales insights and predictive analytics.
Conclusion
A competitive incentive compensation plan will help you attract top sales talent and a high level of engagement is the key to retain top sales talent. Investment in a suitable sales performance management system and an easy to manage incentive management system will help you keep your sales force motivated and engaged. We at Kennect offer you exactly that.
Kennect brings to you two tools that work seamlessly together to deliver transparency and drive engagement among your sales workforce. Sales Performance Management(SPM) by Kennect helps your sales leaders and your sales reps keep a tab on sales activities, anytime anywhere. Incentive Compensation Management(ICM) helps you roll out new and competitive incentive plans easily while keeping it as transparent and simple as possible for your reps.
Visit Kennect at https://kennect.io/request-demo/ for a quick demo.
