Building a sales team that stays: recruiting and retaining millennials

If you're a B2B sales manager, you're always concerned with filling your open sales representative positions.

We hear you, and we feel for you. Last year, we received countless questions from customers and partners seeking our advice on how to attract and retain sales representatives, particularly Millennials. So we compiled our best practices into this leadership guide: Recruiting and Retaining Millennials for Your Sales Teams.

With Millennials soon to be the largest cohort of working professionals ever, this guide teaches you how to motivate and grow Millennials on your sales teams so that you can hire intelligently and hold onto top performers.

The Problem

As you probably already know, hiring and retaining experienced sales reps is becoming more and more difficult. The average turnover rate for sales reps hovers around 34%, with less experienced reps leaving faster than more experienced reps. With the average rep only having about one and a half years of experience, sales orgs have one clear conundrum: why is it so hard to hire and retain top salespeople?

What’s more, your past hiring strategies won’t translate for Millennials because they think differently than other generations when it comes to evaluating a job.

As the guide notes, 75% of Millennials believe that changing jobs every couple of years is beneficial to their career development. Gone are the days where salespeople look for career advancement in a single organization. Instead, it’s often possible to climb higher and faster by jumping from company to company, and Millennials are more likely to value growth than longevity.

One of the top reasons for Millenials’ unhappiness at work is a perceived lack of personal growth, challenges, or clear path for career growth, and more often than not it’s a question about growth, not compensation.

How To Attract and Retain Millennial Salespeople

With every hire, you’re hoping to find a superstar who will help your team exceed its goals. However, even if you do find that great talent, chances are, you’ll lose that great talent in less than 2 years.

With Millennials quickly poised to become the majority of working professionals, sales orgs need to demonstrate how your company is the best place for them to develop their professional skills and the relationships that will grow their career.

There are two solutions:

• Improve your hiring to find excellent talent that’s a good fit for your company so that they’ll stay longer, and ramp faster
• Make your company and sales teams a place where Millennials want to stay and grow

Whether you’re at a start-up looking to build a team or a large, established company trying to fill out your sales team, attracting and retaining Millennials is no longer optional. Read our eBook to extend the value and longevity of your sales team by attracting Millennial sales professionals.