3 Retention Strategies for Sales Employees
“I’m quitting!” declares your top salesperson on a Friday afternoon. If that isn’t bad enough, your four biggest customers are following your star salesperson on the way out. “So what could you have done to prevent this situation?” asks Lisa McLeod, a sales leadership consultant and author of “Selling with Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud.” According to McLeod, you can avoid that gut-wrenching scenario with these three retention strategies for sales employees:
- Meet with your salespeople weekly
- Give salespeople a motivation beyond money
- Keep a database of all your customers
Retention Strategies for Sales Employees
McLeod’s tips for retaining sales employees will help you keep top talent so your team is more successful.
1. Meet With Your Salespeople Weekly
The first strategy, McLeod says, is to make sure you meet with your sales team every single week. A lot of small- and medium-sized business owners tend to neglect such meetings, she says. But it has to happen. The meeting should include everybody on the sales team, even if it’s a video conference.
Unlike office employees, salespeople spend a lot of time out in the field, McLeod says. “So oftentimes, they’re not as connected to your company as the people who work inside,” she says. “So you want to establish not only a physical connection with them but also an emotional connection.”
2. Give Salespeople a Motivation Beyond Money
Another employee retention strategy is to provide employees with a motivation that isn’t monetary, she says. It’s one of those counterintuitive retention strategies for sales employees, but it works.
McLeod says that everyone thinks top salespeople are solely motivated by money. According to her research, however, top-performing salespeople are most motivated by knowing they have a positive impact on their business and customers.
“Salespeople who sell with a sense of noble purpose, who truly want to make a difference in the lives of their customers, outsell salespeople who are just focused on sales quotas and targets,” says McLeod.
3. Keep a Customer Database
One more thing that you can do is to make sure you have a database of all your customers, she says. It’s a retention strategy for salespeople and customers.
“That helps you know what’s going on—to be a better coach to your salesperson—but the other thing that it does is provide you with a safety net,” McLeod says. “So if that salesperson leaves, you still have direct contact with the customers.”
Learn More Top Employee Retention Strategies
Keeping top salespeople is as important as keeping top customers—and often the two go hand in hand. But what are the best ways to do that with your other employees? Keep up the momentum with expert hiring and retention advice from Monster.