The Most Important Metric Your CEO Doesn't Know.

Sales leaders (or HR leaders): You'll miss the mark on some of your sales hires this year - we all do. If you could replace one of the sales professionals that you hire this year who doesn't work out with an "A player" - would that have an impact on your results?

An A player is almost always someone that fits your culture and org, and therefore past success (or lack there-of) may not always be an indicator for their performance. If they didn't crush it in your org, maybe the fit just wasn't right, even though they were highly skilled, experienced, and motivated (more on that coming soon...).

Let’s do some basic math (replace these assumptions with your own numbers):

• 100 employees
• 20% of FTEs are sales or SDRs
• Sales attrition is 25%
• 5 reps attrit this year
• Each attrition will cost $200k (note it’s probably much higher)
• This is a $1M problem for the business

Have you quantified the impact of sales attrition your organization? The *specific impact - do you have a number that the leadership team knows by heart and is actively looking to improve?

It blows me away that most companies don’t measure and track the impact quantitatively. This number is a KPI that should be known, just like NPS or margin.

If you are in a position to do so, maybe you should educate your CEO on this metric - you might be surprised at the outcome.