How committed are your sales, marketing and product teams to your organization?

Turnover of U.S. employees as a whole is nearly 20%, and with salespeople it is as high as 27% — well above the U.S. average for other corporate roles. The time could be nigh, too: Many employees decide to leave their positions at year-end or early in the year after new compensation plans or bonuses are settled.

When employees leave, organizations lose deep product, client and market knowledge, and it can take months, if not years, to replace skilled team members who jump ship. There also comes with it the loss of organizational, process and product knowledge that enable decisions to be made and implemented in a timely manner. The most skilled hire still must adopt and adjust to these unique attributes of a new firm, and the exiting employee may create competitive risks through their strong client relationships and significant solution knowledge.

The risk of attrition is substantial in and of itself, but unmotivated employees can impact your bottom line, too:

• A Gallup study found that companies with highly engaged employees are 21% more profitable.
• The same study found that companies with highly engaged employees were 17% more productive.
• Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) estimates that replacing a salaried employee costs an average of 6-9 months of that person’s salary when you factor in hiring costs, onboarding, lost productivity and time to reach full proficiency. For a $100,000 role, that equates to $50,000–$75,000 per backfill.

Those costs and impacts add up fast with high attrition. Simply put, having motivated and happy employees could translate into big boosts in your company’s revenue performance.

At Mereo, we have determined five essential domains for evaluation to reveal potential strategies for enhancing retention and employee motivation in alignment with your organizational objectives.

How would you rate your organization in these areas?

COMPENSATION

Too often employers make compensation plans difficult to understand. The best plans enable an employee to quickly assess how they can truly impact their outcome by contributing to the organization’s objectives. Moreover, many sales plans also fail to align to corporate, financial or product goals. And most marketing and product team plans lack direct correlations to the actual activities and work output.

Like pricing, compensation plans need to be predictable for you and the employee. Your company should be investing in research or services to validate that your plans are competitive in your market. While you may not put in the research here, you can be certain your employees will.

COACHING

Coaching should not be treated as a “scheduled” activity only but should be a part of nearly every interaction between leadership and employees. Yet a study by Sales Mastery found that a combined 60% of organizations still leave coaching decisions up to the manager (24%) or have a random process (36%).

If you think of coaching as a process, then:

• A “random” approach means that coaching decisions are left up to each manager.
• An “informal” coaching process means that there are guidelines, but they are not completely implemented.
• A “formal” coaching process is one that is defined and implemented, and sales managers are required to use it.
• A “dynamic” approach goes a step further by connecting the coaching process to the enablement framework and, often, rating managers by their coaching impact.

Employing a dynamic coaching approach in sales has been found to yield a 16.6% improvement in sales win rates versus the average company.

EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNING

Formal training helps employees develop and maintain sharpness and skills. But in our experience, over 80% of teams we train express they have had no job skills training in more than 5 years.

Formal training aside, take a moment to consider the learning culture in your organization:

• How does your organization provide employees with new experiences to grow and to create a competitive edge for you?
• Do you enable and budget for employees to take the time to get relevant job certifications?
• Do you bring in external experts to provide unique insights, information and education?
• Have you created opportunities for employees to gain from peer mentoring and coaching that is aligned with organizational and career goals?

Get started by boosting your sales force’s skills in these 10 critical performance areas.

GROWTH

By supporting employee growth, organizations build a positive culture that attracts talent and promotes lasting success. Yet research has found that only one in four employees feel confident about their current role and direction — with 75% browsing new roles at other companies.

According to Culture Monkey, employee growth plays a role in retention by promoting a sense of value and commitment within an organization and may be more inclined to remain with the company. Examples of growth focus areas include:

• Continuous Learning and Adaptation
• Defining and Guiding Career Advancement
• Increasing Job Satisfaction
• Enhancing Performance and Productivity
• Tracking and Improving Employee Retention and Loyalty

TEAMWORK

Recently, I coached two talented high-potential employees from well-established firms on their decision and job acquisition process to move to other firms. Both had been mainly driven to leave because of teamwork — or the lack thereof.

Does your organization prioritize teamwork? While this teamwork concept can be hard to measure, our experience working with clients shows that activities and interactions need to:

• Celebrate milestones such as deal wins, client success, project completions and product releases.
• Build a sense of team through work and extracurricular activities.
• Provide training that is group-based to promote peer-to-peer and cross-organizational experience sharing and to help the employee develop and expand useful internal networks.
• Foster network development and skills learning and practicing in safe environments at events such as meaningful kickoffs and midyear programs.

TAKE A BEAT TO TAKE A PULSE ON YOUR WORKFORCE

What can you do to retain the talent at your organization?

Take a pulse of your employees. Do your high value employees feel highly valued?  Simple activities such as manager checkpoint discussions and skip-level meetings can help you get a sense of the temperature of the employee base.

For expert support in a baseline assessment of your organization, schedule a 30-minute consultation. As the new CEO of Trillium, Phil Galati, put it:

“Mereo immediately helped me baseline our current go-to-market situation, benchmark that against where we needed to be and identify an actionable plan to close the gap.”

To learn how a baseline assessment can support your organization’s talent retention — resulting in increased opportunities, engagements, deals and more — explore Axway’s success story here.