Lack of "Mining the Store"

The tendency to cast aside important workforce infrastructure items— from updating your sales talent profiles, job architecture and career framework to redesigning sales incentive plans— is understandable. When sales teams are meeting their quota numbers, sales leaders are usually kept happy. The problem is this: most salespeople are not hitting quota. Data from the Radford Global Sales Survey shows more than 60% of sales reps are failing to meet their individual quotas. What’s more, the human resources department typically has limited access to sales data and expertise on sales roles.

Failure to keep workforce infrastructure updated is a big miss because sales jobs are evolving fast. Customers are increasingly adopting subscription-based consumption models, making the historically-coveted “hunter” role less important relative to those jobs responsible for driving longer-term, customer lifetime value. Meanwhile, highly-skilled technical sellers are scarcer than ever.

There are incremental steps sales and HR leaders can do to improve the situation. The first step begins with updating your sales job architecture. This can reap significant benefits, such as mitigating the risk of sales employee turnover and avoiding gender pay inequity— two hot-button issues for which the sales organization is by no means immune. In fact, these issues are more likely to persist in the sales organization because of a heavy reliance on quota achievement for determining employee mobility and pay, and the black-box nature of quota management in most organizations.

With job architecture and career framework, we recommend organizations revisit their structures annually or when there is a major event at the company (e.g., a merger or acquisition, incorporating the results of an equal pay audit or a shift in selling strategy). Figure A shows the process of evaluating job architecture.

Figure A
The Building Blocks of Career Framework

Job Structure
Create a detailed job map
to better manage jobs and effectively leverage systems and reporting capabilities

Career Ladders
Specify job leveling criteria
for consistent individual and job analysis across the organization

Job Family Matrices
Flesh out job families
to provide job level requirements and serve as roadmaps for career development discussions

HR, in collaboration with sales leadership, needs to take proactive measures to keep their sales professionals engaged. This includes making sure sales leaders are properly focused on career development (which requires a current or updated career framework). Sales reps often feel there isn’t a clear path toward career growth. When employees aren't challenged or motivated to move to the next level, higher turnover is inevitable. With so many reps performing below quota, HR needs to consider other measures of success, in addition to the company's quota-setting and adjustment approach. This is a talent management issue that’s contributing to high turnover and lengthy recruiting cycles. And sales leadership can’t address the issue without HR's help.

To maintain engagement and provide career flexibility and continued development to high-potentials, we observe more companies promoting employee mobility across functional areas. The concept makes sense on many levels. For one, not all employees want to climb the career ladder or manage people in their designated function. Secondly, some employees benefit in their current function by gaining skills in a related function. Finally, engaged workers almost universally seek new challenges and skills. But traditional rewards systems aren't always flexible in enabling effective employee mobility programs (for example, should the high-performing salesperson take a cut in pay when moving to a role with less incentive upside?). We view internal mobility as an area where more companies will spend time trying to get it right.

Aside from investing in new-hire training programs and ongoing developmental training, companies can manage turnover by conducting comprehensive exit interviews to uncover aspects of the sales job that may be causing a disconnect with employees and evaluating the company's hiring practices to see if it is attracting high performers that fit within the company's culture.

Once the source(s) of the turnover problem are identified, HR, in close partnership with sales leadership, finance and compensation managers, can work on solutions. However, management should not be surprised by an uptick in sales turnover and compensation spend given the current economic landscape and pace of technical innovation.