Guide
Apr 19, 2022
Xactly User Conference May 20-22, San Francisco
A global movement known as The Great Resignation is leading employees to walk away from their jobs due to stress and burnout. Learn how to combat that in this blog.
In the past two years, we’ve seen a decades-worth of digital transformation in the span of a few months–a trend we are still seeing today. While companies are changing operations and breaking the status quo as we come to terms with the new normal of our industries and markets, so are employees.
Last April, the number of workers who quit their job in a single month broke an all-time U.S. record. Economists called it the “Great Resignation”— an informal name for the widespread trend of a significant number of workers leaving their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Who is This Affecting?
Everyone, businesses and employees alike. An SHRM survey of North American workers found 52% of people are actively searching for new jobs, a 35% increase from 2020 to 2021—something they coined as the ‘Turnover Tsunami’.
While attrition is affecting every industry, sales organizations are feeling the waves of this tsunami particularly hard. Voluntary sales departures were highest among technology and software companies at 67%.
Sales organizations typically depend upon the performance of their workforce to generate the kind of revenue needed to grow and scale. Unfortunately, high turnover rates create additional expenses for companies not only with the cost of replacement, but also by constantly losing top performers which interrupts the flow of the revenue stream.
Sales turnover is a challenge every organization faces, especially since a record amount of companies had to flip their entire operations remote almost overnight. Companies went remote and surprise, the world didn’t burn to the ground. In fact, according to Xactly’s The State of Global Enterprise Sales Performance 2021 report, organizations have reported a boost in their connections with both customers and their internal teams. Two-thirds of sales leaders say team communication has become more frequent, and as a result, 67% report that their relationships with direct reports are stronger than in the past.
How Can You Combat This?
You can’t entirely eliminate sales turnover, but you can identify ways to improve employee satisfaction and craft strategies to improve retention
While turnover is a fact of life for sales organizations, being caught off-guard when it comes to attrition and hiring needs is not a feeling you ever want to have. Predictive analytics have emerged as a way to create attrition models in order to identify “flight risk” employees. Once you have a clearer picture of your sales org and know who may be at risk of leaving, you can make more informed decisions on tactics to improve their engagement and retain them, or if you’ll need to backfill their position.
Imagine the consequences when you don’t have the full picture when it comes to your salesforce:
- You don’t have the headcount to generate enough pipeline coverage
- You don’t have the headcount to manage client relationships
- Your territories aren’t aligned
- Your team’s are overworked and opportunities are missed
- You lose revenue from missed opportunities
Xactly Insights® is a powerful tool that provides leaders with a true understanding of their team’s performance—at the individual rep, team, organizational, and industry levels.
Insights’ Sales Rep Attrition Algorithm is built to help sales leaders identify reps at risk for turnover so leadership can take corrective action earlier. Having a “heads up” on performance dips and issues helps sales leaders retain top talent and improve their sales planning, whether that means reassessing territories, adjusting training and career development, providing more enablement opportunities, or offering additional incentives.“By revealing which reps are at the highest risk of undesired attrition, Xactly allows organizations to take immediate steps – before they lose a top rep and impact their revenue attainment,” says Christopher W. Cabrera, founder and CEO of Xactly.
Xactly Insights empowers leaders to drive a stronger organization and optimize team performance. It digs deeper into performance analytics, asks the questions we may not have thought to ask a year ago, and ultimately helps us be more competitive when trying to attract and retain top talent.
The Great Resignation: Threat or Opportunity?
Deciding between threat or opportunity depends on how you view hardship—would you rather hunker down and keep to the status quo, or would you take this as an opportunity to take a look at your operations and figure out new ways to interact with employees?
The key to your success, especially in today’s COVID-disrupted world, is how well you are able to instigate and embrace change. If you can’t assist your organization to change swiftly and easily, it will struggle to adapt. It will struggle to survive.
2020 has reminded the world that all businesses are people businesses. Leaders need tools to help empower employees and optimize team performance, and that’s what Xactly Insights does. It digs deeper into performance analytics, asks the questions you may not have thought to ask a year ago, and ultimately helps you be more competitive when trying to attract and retain top talent.
The workforce isn’t the only thing that has changed since 2020, so has the art of selling. Learn tips, tricks, and industry best practices in the guide, “The Enterprise Leader’s Guide to Success in the New Revenue Era”.
