
Brief overview:
Last week, we published five actionable tips in (Part 1) of 10 Strategies to Retain Top Sales Performers. In this blog, we present the concluding five strategies you can apply in your BD team.
Here are five more strategies to retain top sales performers:
1) Support friendship within the team: Encouraging friendship and bonding among your team members can be very effective strategies for reducing churn. According to OfficeVibe, 70% of employees say that having friends at work is the most crucial element to a happy working life, and most workers (58% of men and 74% of women) would refuse a higher-paying job if it meant not getting along with their co-workers.
2) Celebrate the small victories: Successful business development (BD) team leaders celebrate both small and big wins in their teams. To consistently generate small and big wins in a team, it’s important to encourage your team members to amplify efforts on steady progress of all prospective accounts and develop consistent winning trajectory in the team. This way, team members will be engaged with success everyday instead of banking on one major win that comes once in a while. As Zig Ziglar famously put it: “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing—that’s why we recommend it daily.”
3) Develop capacity within the team instead of hiring from the outside: Most times, employers react to exit of top-tier business development talent by hiring another top performer from outside. On the flip side, the loss of a top performer should be considered as an opportunity to look inhouse and develop capabilities of existing team members.The inhouse approach saves time and resources that would have been spent on searching for a replacement externally. In a nutshell, there are multiple benefits in developing and nurturing skills of business development talents within your team through coaching, training, and key account responsibilities. Such skills upgrade definitely pay-off and prepare your team members to quickly fill the void created by inevitable departure of top sellers in the team.
4) Track Progress and Intervene Early: Performance challenges and KPI shortfalls can occur from time-to-time for even most talented business development manager. So, tracking the numbers is essential to identifying problems in your team before it snowballs into attrition crisis. Slipping performance can be reversed, but left unattended can lead to turnover.
5) Renumerate Them Well: Employers must be mindful of industry salary benchmarks and ensure their business development team members renumerations are at par if not better than their contemporaries. So, paying your BD team members below industry salary scale evokes strong feelings they are not valued in the business. Such ill-feelings within a BD team could easily lead to avoidable attrition.
For next steps from here, I invite you to connect with me directly on 0491 716 954 or email me here.
Let’s schedule an obligation-free consultation. I am keen to understand your unique recruitment challenges and demonstrate how FieldWork Recruiting can become your trusted partner in acquiring top talent.