How to Spot Burnout in Your Salespeople (and What to Do About It)

A successful career in sales is not for the faint of heart. According to aBridge Group study, the annual turnover rate for sales professionals is 34.7%. When you consider that the average onboarding and ramp-up time for a sales professional is nine months or more, that turnover rate starts to have serious consequences for individual sales teams and the revenue they’re responsible for.

But turnover can also be a positive thing.

如果您的团队中没有做出配额的代表，那么与他们分开的方式可能是正确的举动。当您失去高表现者的时候，营业额就成为问题。而且，由于销售人员非常专注于满足他们的人数，因此在为时已晚之前，很难在您的团队中发现倦怠。

Sales Burnout

倦怠是一种情感，心理，有时是身体困扰状态的状态，是由长时间或反复暴露于压力源引起的。由于销售代表的角色通常是高压力，高压的位置，因此对于那些在该领域工作的人来说，倦怠是一个普遍的情况。

好的销售人员值得坚持 - 即使他们碰到了粗糙的斑点。尽管在销售工作时的倦怠感很普遍，但可以缓解它们，并可以提供宝贵的学习机会，以帮助销售经理创造更健康的工作环境。

So here are a few ways to spot burnout in your salespeople, along with helpful strategies for what to do next.

Causes of Burnout for Sales Reps

Here are some common causes of burnout for sales reps.

1. They don’t have mentors.

销售可能是一项令人沮丧的工作，因此对于团队中的每个人来说，都有一名导师很重要。您的销售人员需要有人向他们发泄，寻求建议并与他们分享一些东西，他们可能不愿意送给主管。

Mentorship is also important for professional development. Call didn’t go well? A mentor can listen to the tape and offer objective advice. Rep feeling like they can’t maintain the necessary pace? A mentor can coach them on how to become more efficient with their time, or how to appropriately frame this challenge to their boss.

检查你的销售speople routinely to make sure they’re regularly connecting with their mentors. If they’ve lost touch or haven’t replaced a dormant mentor, it may be a sign they’re feeling too overwhelmed or unmotivated to manage that relationship. Use this opportunity to talk to them about burnout and build a path forward together.

2.他们没有正确的工具。

In sales, every minute counts, so increasing efficiency or shaving even a few moments off a task is key to your salespeople feeling like they have the support and tools necessary to perform. If your salespeople don’t have the right tools to do their jobs or streamline their non-selling tasks, it can be an early indicator that burnout is inevitable.

It’s tempting to try to cut costs here, but don’t. Automating as many of your salespeople’s processes as possible will ensure that they meet deadlines, follow up with every lead appropriately, and close more deals in a shorter amount of time. In fact, Gartner Research finds companies that automate lead management see a 10% orgreater increase in revenue在6-9个月内。类似的工具集线器销售中心can help your team save time on grueling administrative tasks so they can focus on selling and engaging with prospects.

By decreasing administrative strain on your sales team, you’ll remove a major cause of burnout. Start by polling your salespeople to see if your CRM or sales enablement software is still making the grade. Then ask if there are other administrative pain points that are not being met.

Based on these answers, you’ll be able to gauge what your next move should be. If there’s a choice between hiring more salespeople to hit a certain revenue threshold or investing in tools that will make your team more efficient and effective, you’ll almost always want to start by optimizing the toolset currently used by your sales team.

Signs of Sales Rep Burnout

1. They don’t know how to measure success.

对于大多数销售人员而言，成功的主要度量是每月或季度配额达到。但是，如果您的销售人员在该时间范围内没有较小的目标或成功的指标来庆祝，那么他们很容易感到被烧毁。在整个销售过程中拥有适当的工具来自动化和测量KPI，并教育您的销售人员如何击中，监视和庆祝它们。

Most CRMs come equipped with dashboard functionality. Build or customize canned reports to highlight the metrics you want your team to meet, and place them on a dashboard that everyone can see.

Here are a few metrics that can promote a little friendly competition between reps and give your sales team some motivation mid-month:

• 创造的机会
• Opportunities by stage
• Meetings scheduled
• Meetings held
• Demos
• Emails sent
• Quote requests
• Milestone interactions

Use dashboards to promote and manage sales contests as a way to keep motivation high and burnout low. For instance, try a contest around who can book the most meetings this month, or challenge the team to get the average sales cycle down to Y days.

Dashboards also allow you to track salespeople who are sending a ton of emails, booking a lot of meetings, and giving an incredible amount of demos ... but aren’t closing any deals. That’s the kind of effort that leads to frustration rather than results, and it’s an indicator it might be time for you to step in and advise.

每个人都知道他们的配额是他们对抗的最重要的KPI。但是哪个KPI排名第二和第三？确保传达和理解那些重要的非Quota指标。这将有助于防止浪费的努力和挫败感，这两者都导致倦怠。

2. They’ve stopped caring about professional development.

Professional development is something that’s often overlooked for salespeople. Sales is such a fast-paced career, it can be easy for salespeople to zone out any information that’s not immediately helping them close a deal.

If your reps are so focused on making their number that they’ve stopped learning new sales technology or techniques or honing their core selling skills, they may be burned out or fast approaching it.

To combat burnout, make sure you’re sharing interesting or inspiring articles with your team. Start a Slack channel where you’re all contributing one article a week that offers a fresh spin on a tried-and-true tactic, or builds industry knowledge. Encourage them to follow sales influencers likeDaniel Pinkor吉尔·康拉特（Jill Konrath）在社交媒体上。甚至为您的一些销售人员提供了参加引起他们兴趣的会议的机会。

By investing in your team’s long-term success and happiness, you’ll keep their minds active, engaged, and productive — all of which help combat burnout.

3. They lack motivation.

If you notice a salesperson’s lunches getting a little longer or their closed-lost deals becoming less of a disappointment for them, you might be facing employee burnout.

看看他们过去和最近的数字和performance reviews to determine whether this is a trend or an irregularity. If it’s a trend, you may have an employee who can’t perform at the level you require. If it’s an irregularity in this salesperson’s historical performance data, pull them aside and ask them about it.

很有可能，他们已经达到了无法再推动的感觉。从这里，您可以选择如何以三种主要方式继续使用该销售人员：

• 鼓励他们休假几天to recharge without the expectation of answering email or phone, or maybe even offering some quota relief. Salespeople are almost always plugged in, available to answer prospect emails or phone calls immediately. That can easily lead to burnout. Allow them to really unplug, refresh, and reset.
• Put together a performance planthat outlines how your salesperson will get back on track. This might include weekly check-ins, smaller benchmarks, or adjusted numbers. Whatever your performance plan looks like, make sure your rep knows that you’re invested in getting them back to their place as a high performer.
• Be willing to discuss parting ways. Give your salesperson some time to think it over. Often, that can be the jolt they need to reinvigorate their enthusiasm for the job. If it’s not, it might be best for both of you to part ways and explore new options.

4. They’re increasingly negative.

This can be a tough one to spot. Negativity is different than sarcasm. A mainstay of the sales pit is the regular trading of war stories or venting about frustrating calls. But when a salesperson becomes a source of prolonged negativity, it can be a sign of burnout that needs to be mitigated before it spreads.

A workplace survey can be a great way to mine for anonymous feedback that everyone feels comfortable sharing. Make sure you ask about goals, workplace culture, and overall job contentment. You may be surprised how many others on your team are also feeling negative, without openly sharing.

Take their feedback and make changes or address problems openly. This is a time for each side to step up, take responsibility, and move on in a positive way. The outcome should be a better, healthier work environment.

5.他们不愿改变。

If something works, salespeople like to stick with it — for good reason. While there’s no point in reinventing the wheel if a process is working, it’s also important for your sales team to be dynamic, changing with customer and industry trends. Evolution on your team is also a great way to fight burnout.

But if you have a salesperson who refuses to use a new tool that promises to save the team time, or who balks at a new strategy for Sales and Marketing to work more closely together, this could be a sign of burnout.

当销售人员因倦怠而搏斗时，即使是他们当前过程的最小变化也似乎是压倒性的。继续以下步骤：

1. Make the change a requirement.They need to know that the new tool or process is not optional.
2. 提供培训。确保您的销售人员（尤其是那些改变反对者的人）接受有关如何实施新工具或过程的适当培训。
3. Monitor adoption.Have benchmarks your team needs to hit during the implementation of your new tool or process, and hold everyone accountable.
4. 奖励行为变化。改变从来都不容易,尤其是在销售。让苏re you’re acknowledging and rewarding positive steps towards acceptance of new tools or processes that your team makes.

How to Help Reps Recover from Burnout

Want to help your reps navigate through feelings of burnout? We asked the HubSpot sales team for advice — check out their tips below.

Want to start with a quick video? Give this a quick watch for additional ways to support your sales team as a leader:

现在，收听HubSpot销售团队如何主动防御其团队中的倦怠，并制定自己的策略。

1. Create structure for new team members.

According toCierra Steiner, a new HubSpot Growth Specialist team member, structured check-ins with her manager have helped ease her transition and minimize overwhelm.

"I just started in January, and starting a new sales role can be overwhelming. My manager has really helped calm my nerves by reassuring me that we will just take one day at a time. He’ll say, ‘Tomorrow you're going to focus on X — that's it. Don't worry about the week, the month, the year. Just worry about doing X tomorrow.’

I work remotely and he also regularly checks in on me to make sure I'm getting my questions answered and not getting too stressed. It's been an amazing experience so far!"

2.鼓励关于倦怠的公开对话。

For HubSpot Channel Account ManagerDylan Wickliffe，为团队创造安全的空间讨论倦怠是创造健康的工作环境的关键。

"Let it be okay to talk about burnout. Even the best sales reps wake up some days and just simply aren’t feeling it that day.

Encourage breaks. Encourage mental health days. Don’t make reps afraid to admit they're burned out, and let them alleviate it in their own way. Then help them crush it and succeed when they get back to it."

3. Lead by example.

您的团队将为您作为领导者的行为建模 - 好与坏。如果您练习导致倦怠的习惯，那么您的团队将不愿意采取倦怠时要照顾好自己所需的步骤。

集线器频道客户经理Jordan Benjaminsays, "Make it ok to take time off. Work with your team to understand why they do the job and not define who they are solely by stack rank."

Burnout is a natural part of any job or career path. As a manager, it’s part of your job to be on notice when burnout is a threat to your team and the overall growth of your company. Be proactive about it using a few of these tips, and you’ll enjoy a healthy work environment, happy salespeople, and steadily increasing revenue.