The Data Driven Leader

Chapter 5DIAGNOSING WHAT’S WRONG

After the break, the group was chatty as they settled around the conference room table. The morning’s revelations and what they might learn next about sales rep attrition energized the team. Pam nodded to Chloe to proceed.

“Welcome back, everyone. We’ve covered the first four factors in the sales rep attrition ecosystem: compensation, quota, manager, and enablement,” said Chloe. “The fifth is hiring. To recap, it’s been hard to replace good reps, it takes a long time to fill positions, and many new reps aren’t successful and leave within the first year. Of course, the question is. . . ?” She paused expectantly.

“Why!” the group exclaimed, breaking into laughter.

“Yes!” Chloe exclaimed. “And sometimes, quantitative data isn’t enough. You need the insights only humans can provide. This pushed me to survey current reps and managers and ask them what’s going on. That gave me a lot of important clues. I also had conversations with Elke and some hiring managers.”

Chloe continued: “I believe we’ve had issues getting and keeping competent reps for three reasons. First, the high attrition has kept Talent Acquisition too busy putting out fires to build a candidate pipeline, so filling nearly every vacancy means going out and looking for reps. Second, managers tend to tell TA about a vacancy only when they get notice from the employee, and that lack of lead time stretches out the search process.”

“But . . . the third reason is where we start to see our ...