5 Tactics to Motivate Your Inside Sales Team and Lower Employee Turnover
August 25, 2025
By Gene Camm
On average, the annual turnover rate for inside sales positions ranges between 25% and 30%. This means for every ten inside sales team members you have on the job, you can expect to replace up to three of them each year. Moreover, the voluntary turnover rate is about 15%. Translation? 10-15% of turnover is due, at least in part, to performance issues.
No matter the reason for the turnover, the annual cost to replace an inside sales professional ranges between one and a half to two times their annual earnings. So, it costs roughly $200,000-300,000 for each displaced employee.
As a sales leader, motivating your team to meet company sales goals while keeping them engaged at work is critical. Doing so will save you some of the high turnover costs cited above and make for a more harmonious workplace.
There are many ways to engage your sales and other employees effectively. Let’s dig into five:
1. Provide Employee Growth Opportunities
Healthy organizations tend to live in growth mode. And what better way to build a winning culture than by providing employees with opportunities to advance their careers and move up through an organization? Be sure your team members have these clear avenues to pursue growth.
The trend has traditionally been for top-performing sales team members to be given the first opportunities to rise into leadership roles. However, being a top performer seldom prepares someone to be a motivator, developer, and leader of other people. Here’s where training and development enter.
2. Couple Growth Opportunities With Training and Development
To prepare a top-performing sales pro to take on a leadership role, they need to have the foundation and skills to lead people. These skills include how to:
- Train and develop others
- Communicate clearly and effectively
- Establish relationships
- Delegate authority
- Build a team
- Problem-solve
- Resolve conflicts
- Manage time
- Build trust
Providing training curriculum, establishing “buddy” programs, assigning a mentor/coach, role-playing, and providing feedback are all effective ways to train and develop the above skills in your sales professionals. An important part of this training is understanding the employee’s desire to take on this new leading role. Some sales professionals don’t want to lead other people, which is fine; we need these people in the organization, too.
3. Build Trust by Setting Clear and Attainable Expectations
Establishing data-driven results is at the core of every sales organization, but that is not the same as setting clear and attainable expectations. Providing a goal without soliciting input can create a toxic “us-vs.-them” mentality on your inside sales team.
Collaborating with your team members on expectations, on the other hand, opens a dialogue, provides transparency, reduces/eliminates excuses, and encourages planning on goal attainment (both sales results and personal financial gain). Taking this approach and showing a genuine interest in your team members’ success builds trust. In turn, these team members are more likely to reach — or even exceed — these agreed-upon expectations.
4. Encourage Individual Goals to Foster Healthy Competition
In addition to setting clear team-wide expectations, encourage your people to implement personal or self-best goals. When team members meet these goals, it nurtures a sense of accomplishment and motivation.
What’s more, publicly acknowledging these achievements and results cultivates a positive reaction. This is as opposed to pitting individuals against one another, which could have the opposite effect.
Raising the bar on performance and celebrating accomplishment should always be the win-win goal.
5. Create a Rewards and Recognition Program
Creating a recognition program is a logical next step to reward your colleagues who meet expectations and goals. Effective rewards and recognition programs are often multifaceted, combining monetary incentives, formal and informal recognition awards, sales performance incentive funds (SPIFs), LTIPs, and sales gamification.
One note: Be sure the reward is commensurate with the employee’s value-add to your organization.
Along these lines, consider the following factors when designing one of these sales incentive compensation programs:
- Sales cycle
- Product or service complexity
- Profit margin
- Market share
- Hunting vs. nurturing
- Sales type (transactional, solution sales, consultative sales, partnership sales, etc.)
You should also consider the plan mechanics, such as participant eligibility, level of participation, timing and frequency of payment, acquisition cost, and the financial health of the organization (affordability).
In short, creating recognition awards such as a President’s Club, Chairman’s Club, Fast-Starter Program, or Certification for demonstrating expertise is useful to acknowledge exceptional performance and motivate your team. Adding a SPIF can also help motivate an inside sales team. SPIFs are short-term incentive awards to boost sales performance or drive an immediate impact. Related, sales gamification refers to the implementation of game design elements such as points, lottery games (like Bingo), or levels (think of karate belt levels tied to various product mastery) to make sales success fun.
A Multi-Faceted Employee Engagement Approach Awaits
No matter how you do it, keeping your team members engaged and motivated matters in your battle against employee turnover. Turnover hurts sales, productivity, morale, and the bottom line. Since different avenues motivate different employees, applying a multi-faceted approach to motivating your employees should help you appeal to the collective team. We can help.
