"Third prize is some tips for improving your call plan and some quality leads."

Long before I was in sales, I was a teacher. In 10 years as a lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas and Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, I taught hundreds of students the finer points of Public Speaking, Business & Professional Speaking, Persuasion, and Argumentation & Advocacy. But as much as I loved teaching in the classroom, it was really my side gig.

My true love was coaching the policy debate team at UT. Each year, ten to twenty energetic first-years would arrive on campus eager to compete for a spot on the traveling team. While my primary job was ensuring our success at national circuit debate tournaments, my favorite part of the job – by far – was identifying and growing young talent.

Of those ten to twenty students who showed up to the first team meeting each August, only a select few were highly successful (and highly recruited) high school debaters. The rest arrived with some experience in competitive policy debate, but none of the accolades or expectations that come with success on the national high school circuit. It was my job to figure out who among these students had the drive, desire, and aptitude to make it in one of the most intellectually rigorous and time-consuming activities around.

You probably noticed that I didn’t include “talent” in that list of traits I was looking for. Over time, I found that the supremely talented students tended to get pretty far on their own, experiencing at least enough initial success to keep them interested and working toward longer-term goals.

I was looking for the students who had all the tools required for long-term success, but who faced an uphill battle getting there. Balancing a full college course load while adjusting to life away from home is a serious challenge. Adding in 20 hours a week of research, argument construction, and practice debates can be overwhelming. Progress is slow, results aren’t what you hoped, and the competition is consistently outperforming your best efforts. Why even try? Without the right support, an attrition rate north of 50% for that incoming class was the norm.

And that’s where I came in. It was my job to ensure the long-term success of the squad by preventing these hopeful-but-underprepared prospects from abandoning the activity prematurely. I had to consistently challenge them to reach a high standard – competition from above meant there was no way to lower the qualifying bar – AND provide them the training and support they needed to persevere. The results of those efforts were one of the largest, most diverse, and most successful college debate programs of that decade.

When you focus on supporting those on the margin and most at-risk for failure, you can deliver astonishing results.

Flash forward 10 years, and I find myself in a similar place but an entirely different context. Now tasked with helping build a successful company as an individual contributor on a sales team, I’m more participant than coach. And yet, the old teaching habits are hard to shake. I'm particularly fascinated by an aspect of sales that I find utterly shocking. Aaron Ross & Jason Lemkin highlight this problem in From Impossible to Inevitable:

“CSO Insights’ studies show average sales team’s annual turnover of around 25% (it varies by a few points every year), with half quitting and half fired. That means out of 100 salespeople, 25 are lost every year.”

Let that sink in for a minute. In most sales organizations, turnover of this kind is expected, and worse, accepted as a cost of doing business. For startups, that number hovers closer to 50%. Setting aside for a second the question of what kinds of costs this kind of attrition creates, I want to focus on a more important takeaway:

Salespeople should not be expendable.

If you’re a sales leader who’s just come to accept high attrition rates as inevitable, you are part of the problem. This attitude has allowed sales teams to skate by on luck and talent, but it’s an expensive way to operate, and more importantly, it’s a terrible way to build an actual “team.” If you want to lead, you have to coach. Your job isn’t just to celebrate the victories of your most successful reps (and hope they’re enough to make up for the misses by their less successful colleagues). Your job is to provide the resources, support and tools required for everyone to succeed.

If you’re not willing to accept 25% attrition as an inevitable fact of sales, learn to love teaching and coaching. As someone who spent a long time doing both, here are a few things that contributed heavily to our success at the University of Texas.

Numbers may not lie, but they don’t tell the whole truth.

In debate, your record at past tournaments is a pretty solid indicator of your skill-level and potential for future success. In sales, your ability to hit or exceed quota works much the same way. However, in debate as in sales, those numbers are strong indicators, but they don’t tell the whole story.

Ross and Lemkin identify 5 key success metrics for sales: Number of open opportunities in total and per rep; Number of closed opportunities in total and per rep; Deal size; Win rate; and Sales cycle. Sure, you can see how your team stacks up against these metrics, but as Ross and Lemkin note, that’s not really the point: “Rather than judging these metrics as high/low or good/bad, use them to drill into your sales systems and get smart about what affects them the most.”

What are your top performers doing differently than your underperforming reps? Is it a difference of activity, messaging, targeting, style? Can you say for sure what’s working and what’s not? Or are you just looking at performance against quota and calling it a day?

If you’re only looking at the numbers, you’re likely missing a lot of opportunity.

Welcome to the gunfight. Here’s your knife.

Information is the heart of competitive policy debate. Well-researched and heavily-evidenced arguments are at least as important as presentation skills. Before the Internet, debaters spent countless hours in libraries, slogging through stacks of journals and back issues of newspapers on microfiche. It was an incredibly time-consuming and inefficient way to work. When Lexis/Nexis showed up on the scene, the searchable online database fundamentally transformed the world of debate. Without it, you simply could not compete.

In sales, we have a variety of weapons in our arsenal, from old-school tools like the phone and email, to CRMs, marketing automation platforms, auto-dialers, and sales engagement platforms. Have you provided your reps with the tools they need to succeed? Are you keeping up with the latest technology developments to make sure you don’t fall behind? How many deals will you lose before you catch up to your competition?

The best tools won’t guarantee success, but going into battle with inferior weapons is a recipe for disaster.

Repeatable success is never an accident.

Racking up a win against a much stronger opponent feels great, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve achieved superiority, or even parity. A win is nice, but consistently trouncing the opposition is why we work so hard at our craft – whether we’re talking about debate or sales.

To achieve repeatable success, you have to be able to answer those questions we raised earlier: Why are our highest-performing reps enjoying success? Why are underperformers struggling? We’re all selling the same product, so it’s likely not a question of market fit or competitive advantage. What is it about the actual sales activities that differentiate these two groups?

Once you can answer these questions, you have the information you need to effectively teach and train your team. And when you teach and train, you give your underperforming reps what they need to succeed. It’s the best – and only – way to conquer attrition.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Sales training shouldn’t be confined to onboarding. Training is a continuous process. Your reps are out there every day discovering new paths to success. If you’re not following them on that journey and making note of what’s working each step of the way, you’ll likely find that you’re always teaching new dogs old tricks. To stay on top of your teaching game, you have to stay abreast of new developments in the selling environment. Keep up with changes to the market, new offerings from competitors, new technologies to aid you in your battles. To be a great teacher, you have to be a life-long learner.

You also have to care about your students. In sales, that means caring about your reps. And anybody who believes a 25% attrition rate is acceptable has already lost the battle. 

*Title edit inspired by Jennifer Dawkins, who noted that the original was pretty "meh".