What is the biggest thing negatively impacting your sales team culture, and why is it employee turnover?

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Head of Sales in Software2 years ago

This is definitely a big part of it for any company but it is one of those problems that snowballs well beyond the short term impact of losing someone. Losing someone who was a net negative on culture is usually a good thing, but can still damage the culture even though they were a bad fit. 

For example, let's say you are running an enterprise team or going through an economic slowdown that makes deals take longer. You lose someone, then you need to replace them. No problem, they had conflicts on the team and weren't really team players. That's the positive. The negative is now you'll have to replace that person with someone who is not going to sell anything for 6 months+ and that clock only starts once they're through onboarding. Ok that's fine, you can plan for that. 

HOWEVER, if you start to see a trend and the team turnover persists, the problem doesn't just stay the same, it exacerbates. You lost someone who was underperforming, but you were getting something from them. Now you've got 2 new great people who you're confident will produce, but it's going to take 6 months or more. It is a tricky situation where you can end up being incredibly reliable on a couple reps to overachieve just to come close to targets, that typically don't downshift into your current team headcount. Longer term, consistently missing targets sends your team down the wrong path and your culture becomes one where missing is okay because of all the change in the mind of the reps. That won't work.

So it is very tricky handling consistent turnover and it is something you have to nip in bud very quickly or it can spiral out of control. Not a problem at bigger companies necessarily but if you've got a team that is 0-30 reps, this can be a real issue. 

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