The zero turnover sales force

Imagine a world in which you have the same sales force 90 days from now that you have today. One hundred twenty days from now.

A year from now.

If your sales team gives you indigestion on a daily basis and haunts your dreams at night, this will be a terrifying vision. For most sales executives, though, retaining productive salespeople is simply an alluring fantasy that’s totally unconnected with reality. A stable, unchanging sales force? Hardly any recruiting? No ramp-up cycles? Are you delusional?

No, you are not.

Companies of all sizes are already operating in a zero-turnover sales environment. They’re able to do this because their sales executives and company management had the vision to do the things we’ll cover in this book. They surmounted another challenging issue, too: the impatience of top executives who want revenue shortfalls addressed immediately but haven’t a clue about how sales works. As we’ll discuss later, the majority of CEOs, COOs and other such company bigwigs today do not come from sales backgrounds. They’re finance people, lawyers and entrepreneurs. And whatever their calling, they have little patience with anyone who doesn’t chirp, “I’ll have everything turned around by this time tomorrow.” Remember this: The boss didn’t get to the big office with a snap of the fingers. 
 
He or she got there with a plan, and that’s how we’re going to fix your sales force turnover issues. Planning and persistence make it happen – and no successful plan blossoms overnight.

It's Not a Quick Fix
There’s no silver bullet that will instantly transform an underperforming sales force. We can’t simply write a memo, fire off an e-mail, or call a meeting and expect to turn around a group of people that was hired and trained the wrong way and spends its time unproductively. Top management, of course, will want this.

One of your jobs is to be the wise counsel of patience, perhaps even secreting copies of this book in boardrooms, executive washrooms and golf lockers. And among the first items on your to-do list to reduce sales force turnover is to get the bosses to buy into the idea that these conditions absolutely must exist:

• Your sales force is stable. 
• You hire and train the right people the right way in the first place.
• Old-school ways of contacting prospects are tossed out the window.
• The sales manager leads rather than attempts to motivate.

When you have them firmly in place, the enormous expense of turnover will be all but eliminated, and dependable long-term revenue will follow.

What’s more, if you make the bosses think that it’s their idea, you’re way ahead of the game.

The easiest way to implement a zero-turnover sales force is to start from scratch. If you have the good fortune to manage a brand-new sales force in either a new company or a new division of an existing company, you have the blank canvas on which to craft a neat, clean beginning. Most of us don’t have this luxury. We’re stuck with the muck that our predecessors – decades of them in many companies – have bequeathed to us. But if we’re the ones who have been in charge and if we’re being honest (and why not be honest once in a while, just for the exercise?), we may have to admit that the muck is our own creation.

You most likely have “if this, then this” scenarios in place for your salespeople: If this idiot doesn’t make budget again, he’s gone; if she blows one more close, she’s out of here; if they don’t pound those phones, cold calling exactly fifty or a hundred unsuspecting prospects today and every day, the whole wretched bunch of loafers is history. That’s it, period, the only way to do it.

And when they’re gone, you’ll start all over again.

If this sounds familiar, take comfort: You’re not alone. Most sales forces are in constant states of flux. Likely suspects are recruited. New hires cycle through the training regimen. Veterans (some of whom have actually been there for months or years) pound the phones, make the cold calls, work on the presentations, dance the challenging Buying-Cycle Boogie, and try to bring home the bacon. The High Priest of Negotiation struggles to feed the God of the Budget. And somewhere down the hall or up the elevator or across the time zones, there is the Voice on the Phone. This voice rules your life. It may couch its words in more or less conciliatory language, but the message is always the same:

The investors/board/shareholders/Big Cheese is/are all over me about revenue. You’ve got to hit those numbers! If you don’t, roll those fakers out of there and get some hot bodies that can sell. And if you can’t do that, I’ll put somebody in your chair that can!

You can only rage, meditate, work out or bend paper clips so much before you begin to question whether the way you’ve been doing things – the Old School way – is in fact the right way.

Consider Some Tantializing What-ifs
Given the scenario we’ve just laid out, you might even begin to ask yourself some important questions – some thought-provoking “what-ifs”:

What if you weren’t actively recruiting salespeople all the time?

“Wait,” you plead, “I can’t do that! There has to be fresh talent in the pipeline. You never know when somebody will quit or I’ll have to bounce ’em out of here. When that happens, I’ll need a fresh sack of meat or two to cover the business!” This is true, unless you’ve created a sales force that experiences little or no turnover, in which case your need for fresh troops will obviously be very, very small.

What if your staff was at full speed right now, without working up the new hires?

In the zero-turnover environment, you seldom have to wait for one or more recently hired salespeople to finish their initial training and get up to speed. That costly and inefficient start-up period evaporates when you rarely have to bring new people aboard. Of course, it’s laughable to think that every salesperson is going to perform at the same dizzying level. If that were the case, we’d all be phoning it in from the Bahamas. But while individual skill levels and sales outputs may vary, lack of turnover keeps the entire sales force intact, focused, and heading in the same direction. And when you’re managing a bunch like that, life gets a whole lot easier.

What if you didn’t have to fire someone this week/this month/ever?

Now really, do you enjoy firing people? If you do, please wait outside. I’ve known a few of your kind, and there’s a special place for you. But if you’d really rather not ruin lives, upset families and overcrowd the unemployment office, then you’re as normal as someone like us is going to get. In that case, what you would rather do is lead the sales team, coach your salespeople, exercise your creativity, and go forth and dominate the market. In short, you would rather do what you do best instead of constantly feed an eating machine that sucks in unsuspecting souls at one end, digests them, and then spits them out the other end. That’s a treadmill to oblivion. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

This book shows you how to create a selling environment that not only makes people want to stay aboard, but actually makes it possible for them to do so. Remember, though: There’s no silver bullet. There’s only vision and hard work.

Back to the top of the chapter: What if you really did have the same sales force 90 days from now that you have today?

A tantalizing question, indeed. But before we begin to roll out the answers, let’s look at what really happens to the bottom line when sales turnover is a fact of life.

Starting Today
Take a serious look at the turnover in your sales force over the last three years. If the number is north of one or two a year, it’s too high.

Talk to every person on your team who came from a competitor. Find out why each of them left that former job. Zero in on the turnover issues that the other guys are experiencing. You’ll be amazed at what you learn. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to avoid repeating the problems that are bedeviling your competitors. Advantage: you.

Go ahead and dream. What if you were out of the hiring and ramping-up business and were able to spend all your time leading an intact sales force? Plot out a plan of action that assumes the presence of a sales force that’s always tuned up and ready to go. How different does that look from the results you’re getting now? 

 
The article was excerpted from “The Zero-Turnover Sales Force: How to Maximize Revenue by Keeping Your Sales,” by Doug McLeod. ©2010 Doug McLeod. All rights reserved. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of the American Management Association. For more information, visit www.amacombooks.org.