Personnel turnover can be rough for any department in any company. When someone departs, they often do not leave a complete job description and list of duties behind so that a new person can easily take over. The downtime between the old employee departing and the new one coming fully up to speed costs the company money.
Turnover is especially difficult in a company’s sales force which deals directly with revenue. When sales reps depart, companies immediately lose regular sales from their territories. While candidates are being interviewed, more sales are lost as more time passes. When a new person finally comes on board, he or she still has to learn the product and the market, which means even more sales are lost until he or she finally comes up to speed. It could be six months later that the new rep starts paying off — if that rep even works out.
One way for companies to deal with these kinds of transitions is to let Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software do the heavy lifting when they are between employees.
Without an adequate CRM solution, it can be a nightmare trying to dig out, take over and sell any deals that were in that person’s sales pipeline. How will the sales manager or another rep pick up where the last employee left off?
In addition, when the new sales rep comes on board, the CRM software should be able to show the rep the steps of the sales process (which hopefully exist). If CRM software doesn’t allow deals to be accurately followed there will be even more time wasted as the rep devises his or her own solutions for properly tracking these deals and controlling them, while also being required to enter data into CRM program that will not be useful to the sales rep later on down the road. This is all in addition to doing what the rep was hired to do: sell.
How much time do you think it will take to bring that new rep on board — and how much more time before that salesperson is pulling his or her own weight in relation to the overall sales quota?
Following the path of the sale, after a rep leaves a company it can be easily seen not only what deals are left in the former salesperson’s pipeline but exactly where they were in the sales process. There is enough data available so that the sales manager or another sales rep could pick up the important deals and push them through to closes.
When the new sales rep comes in, the rep can clearly see how a sale travels from lead to satisfied customer, so understanding of the sales process is much faster. The CRM allows placing of sales training documents within each applicable step of the sales pipeline, allowing experienced sales reps to share their wisdom so that everyone — including the new salesperson — to take advantage. Training is much smoother. The right CRM makes data on in-progress sales much more accurate and clearer, enabling the new sales rep to pick up sales left incomplete by the former rep.
Last, but certainly not least: with all possible confusion removed from the runway, that rep can be brought on board and will be up to speed in remarkably less time than it would have taken before when using inadequate CRM.
When it comes to sales force turnover, the right CRM solution makes transitions as smooth and as painless as possible.
