The Sales Development Blog

Your place for the latest scoop on sales trends, techniques, and career advice.

We Love When You Leave: Sales Employee Turnover

For many inside sales managers, employee turnover is a huge problem. It seems no one wants to stay in the inside sales profession forever. At memoryBlue, we’ve learned a lot about sales employee turnover over the years. Here’s our story:

A while back, we hired an employee who was so charming he reminded us of Will Smith—a regular Agent J. He was charismatic, always smiling, and drew people to him like a magnet.

In addition, he had a constantly running motor that made him a top producer in three months. He was born to sales like a fish to water.

Then he was offered a higher paying job with one of our clients. In one fell swoop, we lost one of our best employees and one of our best clients. We weren’t sure how we were going to bounce back.

 After some soul searching and discussion, the team realized that Agent J’s departure wasn’t the end of the world; it was one of the best things to ever happen to memoryBlue.

It’s not goodbye, it’s good for us

One lesson we learned from Agent J’s departure was that when a client hires away one of your employees, it’s a compliment.

The client saw the same positive attributes we saw when we first interviewed this employee. In addition, the client recognized the value of the training this employee had received while working at memoryBlue.

When a client hires away one of our employees, they no longer need our services, and that’s certainly not good. However, finding new clients and employees has helped us avoid a patient-therapist dependency cycle—the kind of relationship where nothing changes, nobody benefits, and no real progress is ever made.

Have you seen this movie?

Inside sales teams are mostly populated by two types of professionals: Rookies and Lifers.

The Rookie: Fresh out of school and eager to start selling and blow the doors off any and all comers.

Rookies have a slightly lower floor because they are starting out. They don’t expect much because they don’t have any former experience. They accept their situation because ignorance is bliss.

However, even though they’re on the ground floor, the sky is the limit! Rookies have an inexhaustible supply of energy and bounce back when they stumble. This certainly helped Marc Benioff, who was hired right out of college as an Inside Sales Rep for Oracle, and is now the CEO of Salesforce.com.

Now consider, the Lifer. Gruff but wizened, the Lifer has seen it all: the ups, the downs and the in-betweens.

Their experience and career make them solid producers. You can always count on their numbers. However, their numbers are always the same, never going down and never going up.

At memoryBlue, we choose rookies. We follow the same philosophy as pro football teams– everybody wants to get Andrew Luck on their team, no one is clamoring to get Donovan McNabb!

This choice comes with a major drawback: much like Agent J, Rookies are always looking for the next mountain to climb, and as we’ve experienced firsthand, they often find it outside of your sales department.

The benefits of alumni

As memoryBlue continued to grow, we watched as some of our most successful employees elevated into roles with high tech heavyweights like Oracle, Symantec, Eloqua and McAfee.

As we shifted from mourning turnover to celebrating it, we were growing a powerful alumni network.

Today, there are over 50 former memoryBlue alumni in the field, and we use that number as a benchmark for our efforts. Having these salespeople make their mark at prestigious tech companies tells us that we’re doing an excellent job of identifying, hiring, and developing talent.

Not only do we count our alumni network as a sign of how well we’re doing, we constantly use our alumni to grow our business. Often, these young, ambitious salespeople have friends who are Rookies perfect for the memoryBlue team. While we can’t boast 7,000 alumni like Bain and other big strategy consulting firms known for leveraging alumni networks, we use the same philosophy of mutual advancement.

A parting shot about leaving

At memoryBlue, we hire and train highly-motivated individuals who want to learn how to sell successfully.

Once we’ve accomplished this, our sales team is primed to work within any company’s own infrastructure to generate leads and revenues.

When a client hires away one of our employees, one relationship is over, but a new one has just begun.

And just like Agent J transforms his Men in Black uniform through pure charisma, when our employees leave to work for top tech companies that makes us look good.

What do you think? Have you ever lost your Will Smith employee? How did you handle it?

If you’re interested in learning more about the memoryBlue approach to inside sales, download our free eBook, “Should You Insource or Outsource Inside Sales?”

Image Source

Marc Gonyea oversees daily operations and establishes the strategic direction for the firm. Under his leadership, memoryBlue has developed into one of the leading outsourced inside sales providers for the high tech industry.

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