If your key account managers have deeper knowledge of about clients that they aren’t sharing, what happens when they leave?
January 22, 2026
Originally published September 2020. Updated January 2026.
“The greatest risk in sales is a lack of information.” Maestro cites this as a mantra for all our sales training and coaching clients. For the most part, it informs a salesperson’s efforts to gather information about a potential sale, such as resource availability or the prospect’s expectations about timeline. But full information is essential to every part of a business in order to mitigate risk along the way. This week, we are going to look specifically at internal risk in sales and how information can protect against those risks.
Many sales teams over-rely on a small number of high-performing individuals. This scenario carries risk on multiple vectors. Research at Yale revealed that star salespeople often have deeper access to information about key client accounts than is shared with their employer through official channels (CRM, etc.).
Recent research published in Industrial Marketing Management digs deeper into knowledge sharing in sales. It found that more knowledge sharing correlates with better key-account performance, and the more formalized the knowledge sharing process, the greater the impact it has. Translation: if you want to lower risk in sales, integrate your CRM into your sales process and hold people accountable for using it. Even small details and observations should be included.
Turnover is the largest risk when you have a poorly formalized knowledge-sharing process. When salespeople leave, it interrupts progress on their sales in the funnel. It can deprive your business of information that was not adequately memorialized. In some circumstances, your sales reps may even take their existing client relationships to a competitor. Or a top salesperson may create a negative work environment for those around them, but be difficult to fire because you rely on their sales.
Finally, turnover simply costs money, since you’ve lost the fruit of your efforts onboarding, training, and ramping the salesperson. Attrition and employee turnover cost businesses an enormous amount. When hiring a new sales employee, it takes 381 days for them to get to the performance level of a tenured salesperson. Plus, the average cost of replacing a salesperson can run between $100K and $130K, while average turnover rates are 35%.
Between losing knowledge and losing money, it pays to reduce turnover in your sales team. So, what approaches have proven effective for reducing attrition and retaining motivated salespeople?
With the rise in easily available human-resources data, HR leaders have begun to try to model the likelihood that salespeople in their organization will leave. Research published in organizational-psychology journals offers a host of statistical approaches and algorithms that enable data scientists to apply existing research on turnover to their companies’ actual situations.
This approach is very promising for large organizations that want to stem the bleeding from large-scale sales attrition. Attrition modeling brings with it several challenges, though. First of all, it requires a skilled data scientist, which is not exactly a cheap hire. Second, algorithms can’t successfully answer everything they are asked to answer. For example, companies that try to use the likelihood of attrition in hiring have discovered that the algorithms are influenced by biased data sets. Underrepresented minorities will continue to encounter roadblocks to hiring when past data shapes future hiring without thoughtful evaluation by HR professionals.
Attrition modeling is a cutting-edge response and is well-suited to very large organizations. It’s promising to solve the turnover problem in sales at a Google or GEICO. For smaller firms, though, such an approach is expensive overkill. In essence, attrition modeling tries to answer two questions:
1. Do you know who is going to quit?
2. Is there an explanation for the turnover that you can solve?
But there are also some unstated concerns in the background of any conversation about attrition:
3. Do you rely on people who are likely to quit?
4. How resilient is your organization if they leave?
Even without an answer to #1, leaders can make significant improvements that both reduce sales attrition (solve #2) and cushion its impact (#3 and #4). An audit of your sales team and process can reveal who the top performers are, whether their practices are spread uniformly through the sales team, whether you have access to all of their business-relevant information, and how intense your reliance on them is.
After understanding the situation, you can work to improve it. Establish an expectation of consistent CRM usage, so all information is available across the whole team. Identify an optimal sales process and ensure it is used across the whole team, spreading the stars’ successful habits to all salespeople. Memorialize the process so that new hires can have a confidence-building set of steps to learn during a consistent onboarding.
As it turns out, this solution works out on multiple levels. Auditing sales practices to establish process guidelines and then replicating them across the whole team will improve efficacy for the entire sales organization. If anyone leaves, even if it’s your highest performer, the rest of the team will be equipped to fill the gap.
Meanwhile, this process and improved onboarding both involve development and training. Two of the top drivers for sales attrition are employee dissatisfaction with compensation and with career-development opportunities. To target that training in a way that will improve salespeople’s job retention as well as their skills, use open-ended questions (yep, those again!) to discover what employees want to learn and improve in—an approach that simultaneously demonstrates empathetic leadership while reducing attrition and lowering your overall risk in sales.
By providing training and skills development to salespeople who aren’t currently top performers, a business can both improve its success rate and stop sales attrition. Both of these results enhance the value of the company’s investment in the salesperson.
What kind of sales training opportunities does your team want? We’ve got you covered. Reach out to mastery@maestrogroup.co.
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