How to Retain Top Salespeople: Part 1

by Ben Lai | Sep 9, 2019

Hi, I’m Ben Lai from Sales Ethos. Today’s topic is how to retain top salespeople. This is a two-part series specifically for sales managers.

Top talent is hard to find and hard to retain. Because they’re so good at what they do, they can sell themself into any job that they want to. So how can you make sure that they want to stay with you for the long term Now, there are six factors in total, and today, we’re just going to cover three.

How to Retain Top Salespeople Tip #1: Give Recognition

The first one is recognition. When a top sales performer is doing well, you need to recognize their efforts. Recognition cost almost nothing. It’s just a few words. A pat on the back, a shake of the hand saying, “Well done.” People live and die for recognition, and so this is one of the top things that you need to do to retain your top sales people.

One of great pieces of leadership advice that I’ve been given is that when you recognize performance, you do it publicly, and when you need to talk about something critical or something such as ways of improving or something that they didn’t do right, then do that privately. When you’re recognizing your top sales people, make sure you do it privately and publicly. Let people know that this is a top performer and that he is doing well.

How to Retain Top Salespeople Tip #2: Give Them a Sense of Belonging

The second thing that you can do to increase your retention rates for top sales people is to give them a sense of belonging. What I mean by this is let them feel like they’re part of the family. If you take a personal interest in their life, their family, their interests, this is showing that you have an interest in not just them as a sales person, but as a human being. This is really, really important if you want them to feel like they belong to your organization.

If you happened to ride along with them on their sales meetings, then that’s a really great way to connect with them on a personal level. Or share meals with them. Buying the team lunch is a great way to have time to talk about non-work related things. So a sense of belonging is really important.

Before I go into the third point, a quick offer for you as a sales manager, a one-hour complementary consultation to handle your top challenge that you’re facing right now. Click the link below, fill in your details, and we’ll arrange a time to meet.

How to Retain Top Salespeople Tip #3: Give Appropriate Compensation

The third thing that we need to do to retain top sales people is to have a appropriate compensation plans. Now, it is a well known fact that if you are underpaying them, that this will be a major factor for them wanting to leave. You need to make sure that their base and their, plus commission, is at a rate that they are happy with, otherwise, they will go looking elsewhere for better compensation.

That’s not to say that the more you pay, the more likely it is that they’ll stay. Because a person would rather leave a high paying job with a toxic culture and toxic management than to put up with it for the sake of money. Money isn’t everything, but you must meet their minimum expectations of compensation. So it doesn’t matter that you’re not the top paying amount, but you certainly need to reach a certain threshold.

Next time, I’m going to go into three additional things that you can do to retain top sales people, but feel free to leave a comment below if you want to add to this list. Click forget to like and subscribe, and remember that integrity plus skills equals success.

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