Are You Predicting 'Effective Retention' When Hiring Sales Execs?

Double your ROI by employing high-performance sales professionals who are likely to stay with your organisation for a long time.

- John Marshall

Like every organisation, you know the importance of selecting the best candidates when hiring sales professionals, helping those employees develop into your top performers, and retaining them over time.

This concept is at the heart of what we refer to as ‘effective retention’. In our research and ongoing work with top organisations, we do not simply predict and evaluate only performance or only retention. ‘Effective retention’ is looking at these two factors together and understanding that as an organisation you must focus on retaining sales people who are performing well.

It’s not enough just to retain people; it’s not enough just to hire top performers.

The key to achieving effective retention is gathering systematic data and using a systematic process for hiring. With systematic data about your specific company, you can build accurate predictive analytics that consistently maximise ROI. Predicting effective retention is the ultimate goal of most systematic selection processes.

In order to best understand effective retention and how it can be achieved through systematic data and processes, let’s break down the concept in terms of retention and performance.

PREDICTING RETENTION WHEN SELECTING SALES PROFESSIONALS

In over 35 years of gathering data and research, we have found a number of data points that typically predict retention.

For example, previous job stability often predicts future retention. People who stay in their previous jobs for longer periods of time tend to be more easily retained than those who were jumping around prior to applying to your organisation. In many cases, past behaviour predicts future behaviour (although predicting retention cannot be achieved with only one data point – the person may have had good reasons for changing jobs).