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The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Is There Really a Single Cause for Missing B2B Sales Numbers?

Is There Really a Single Cause Missing Revenue NumbersProbably not! It’s only a slight exaggeration. After 21 years of consulting sales organizations of all sizes, both here in North America and overseas, I can tell you there is one thing that executives and sales managers keep getting wrong.

There is one thing that delivers a double-whammy: It prevents them from reaching their revenue projections and it drives their sales-related expenses through the roof... impacting cash flow hard, twice. And, that expense is NEVER included in anyone’s formal plans.

That one thing is: The cost of employee turnover in Sales.

Annual turnover rates among salespeople and sales managers are shockingly high, they’re largely untracked and unknown by top management, and they stand between you and the performance you seek. While companies spend countless hours developing finely-crafted strategic plans and often complex formulas based on a wide range of variables for projecting revenue, they pay scant attention to the one thing that has the greatest impact on their top-line revenue and bottom-line profits.

There are obvious costs of b2b sales department turnover that you have probably seen in turnover calculators like:

  • Salary
  • Draw payments paid but not earned
  • Benefits
  • Payroll taxes
  • Training
  • Sales Manager’s time trying to develop the salesperson

But, there are less obvious costs as well:

  • Broken relationships
  • Lost intelligence about customer/needs
  • Failure to maximize each customer’s potential
  • Customers who desert you
  • Lost revenue in every sales chair open
  • Lowered standards in your department

There are more, but I know you can feel this pain. By the way, we see that when sales managers turn over, you can multiply the damage by ten. Personnel turnover is expensive wherever it occurs in the organization, but when it happens in sales, it’s twice as expensive—especially if you plan to do business again with those customers.

The good news is there are things you can do to avoid this problem –five specific recommendations that can change your life as a manager. They are outlined in some detail in our white paper, Sales Staff Turnover:  More Expensive and Destructive than You Think.  You can also read a case study from one of our clients that saved nearly $2 million dollars a year by reducing sales department turnover by half.

 

Get the white paper now - Sales Staff Turnover:  More Expensive and Destructive than You Think.


Jim Hopes is the Chief Executive Officer at The Center for Sales Strategy


Topics: sales performance