As surprising as it may seem, I didn't hop from one company to another in search of the Holy Grail of Sales.
So why, as a sales rep, am I so "loyal" to Letsignit?
Well, it’s largely because of the company culture, employee engagement and well-being, and internal mobility.
Through my career – which I consider atypical – I would like to demonstrate to: all business owners, directors, HR (and even internal communications) that it is possible to retain salespeople and that one should not fear investing humanely to enable the success of their teams.
The adventure began just before the separation of activities at Mailinblack (where I worked for a few months) from those of Letsignit.
Freshly graduated from business school, my beginnings in sales were marked by managing a portfolio of SME clients.
From mid-market sales to Channel Manager, to major account sales and then manager, I humbly share with you 5 tips – which I believe are essential – to retain your salespeople and, more broadly, your employees.
It’s well known that salespeople are motivated by the lure of money. That’s normal. It’s an inseparable part of our jobs, but it’s not the only driving force.
While in the past, salespeople were often driven solely by financial gain, today it goes much further.
Involvement in decision-making and being considered a full-fledged member of a team have become key factors in engaging and retaining employees.
These elements must be considered from the recruitment process.
It’s crucial to make new hires – just like the more experienced ones – understand that you believe in their work and their ability to generate business and help their colleagues do the same.
Don’t be afraid to challenge your employees and assign them responsibilities. This is even crucial if you want them to stay motivated and fully invested in their work.
And, I say this from experience.
If I have stayed at Letsignit all these years – as a salesperson – it’s because they trusted me and challenged me in my various roles from the start.
Of course, it must be done with kindness and by considering the needs of your employees.
If I refer to my own career, the company has always been in a growth context. In the early days of the solution, many CEOs would have bet on more experienced profiles to sell Letsignit to businesses. No one would have bet on a young graduate with such stakes.
You might think that entrusting such responsibilities to a junior profile could be intimidating.
But, if everything is done with kindness and trust, there’s no reason to fear.
For me, the trust given was a real driving force. I truly knew why I was there.
From the beginning, the company shared its vision, challenges, objectives, etc. I was clearly made to understand that it wasn’t just about paying a salary in exchange for work. I was considered a full-fledged member of the team and the Letsignit family. I immediately felt included in the team and the tasks I was entrusted with.
When a company hires a new person, it invests in their potential.
This is a key message to convey.
If we are implementing changes, it’s so that employees can generate business and retain clients.
But, it’s not just about that!
The company must follow the new market trends to gradually guide its employees in adapting their methods and expanding their skill sets.
Today, I am loyal to Letsignit because they knew how to help me evolve and challenge me in my roles. It wasn’t just about chasing goals, but about giving me the opportunity to thrive in my sales role by opening up new horizons.
Of course, it’s not about changing everything constantly.
It’s about being able to meet market expectations whether in growth marketing, sales, or customer support. One must know how to make the right changes and ensure they align with the company’s needs. To do so, listening to employees and considering their feedback is essential.
We spend 80% of our time working alongside our colleagues. If there’s no sense of being heard by peers, one can quickly question their place in the company.
And this is not only true for salespeople. It applies to all departments. Based on feedback from my sales colleagues: most companies tend to put pressure on salespeople when objectives are not met.
But, do we truly try to understand why?
In my opinion, without active listening, it’s impossible to truly identify the issues and needs of employees.
Active listening is, in fact, the key to good management. If you listen to your employees, as a CEO or a member of the management team, you can provide them with the means to reach their goals. This might involve:
The company’s ability to adapt to meet the needs of its employees is a strong sign of consideration. It shows a lot of kindness towards them.
In fact, this is one of the reasons that also encouraged me to stay at Letsignit over the years.
This active listening happens both on a professional and personal level. It helps maximize the highly sought-after work-life balance.
Employees are the first to be impacted by a lack of structure or tools in their work. One must know how to listen actively to them to identify needs and structure/reinforce teams. And this inevitably involves structuring "from the top," i.e., structuring the management team.
Recruiting a person who can manage, listen, and strengthen the teams in a department is essential.
Building a team without a leader at the helm is like sailing without a rudder.
If I take the case of Letsignit, it took us some time to solidify the sales team. Initially, the need for someone to lead this department wasn’t apparent.
To give you some background, the sales department grew gradually with the company’s growth. As mentioned earlier, I held several roles at Letsignit, including that of sales team manager.
But at some point, the need for someone more experienced became clear. That’s when Anthony POYAC joined Letsignit as Sales Director to support the entire Sales team.
Although every company is in search of growth or profitability, it should not neglect human relationships, as employee well-being is, in my opinion, the driver of performance.
The desire that Damien Neyret had to create this company culture and give such care to his employees is reflected in everything: in the work, in the offices, in team cohesion, in his accessibility, and in the company culture.
None of this happened overnight; I’m talking about nearly 10 years of work. And today, we can say, all departments are united and moving in the same direction.
Damien has made sure to pay particular attention to our well-being – to us, his employees – in a level of detail that is impressive, but most importantly, inspiring.
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If we take a step back from what has been said:
Salespeople are not volatile. They ask for more than just goals and targets. Give them the opportunity to unlock their potential and fully thrive in their work. Ignite the sales spark within them.
This is also true for other departments.
Always be kind to your employees and offer them a healthy working environment. There is no magic formula for retaining your salespeople. However, I remain convinced that these 5 tips can help you.
Finally, I’ll ask you: what do you think makes a salesperson/employee want to get involved and stay in a company?
Yes, with the 'Campaigns' offer, it is possible to track the number of clicks on the email signatures of all your employees in the 'Statistics' area of the platform.
You can then access a detailed or global view of the number of clicks on the email signatures of each employee. You can use the search option to target a specific signature or a given period. Finally, you have the possibility to export all statistics to an Excel document.
If you launch campaigns with banners inserted in your email signatures, you can also access their performance via this same space.
With Letsignit, you can easily add social network icons in your collaborators' email signatures and link to your company pages. Also, our "attributes" feature allows you to manage personalized URLs for each of your collaborators such as their individual LinkedIn profile.
And that's not all: you can add links to an appointment-setting application, allow your customers to leave reviews easily, and integrate our 'Chat on Teams' widget to let anyone start a discussion via Microsoft Teams chat.
It’s up to you! As an administrator of the Letsignit platform, you choose whether or not to grant modification rights to your employees. These permissions are managed on an attribute-by-attribute basis, which means that you can decide to allow the employee to change their phone number, but not the address of your premises, for example.
This feature applies to all attributes in your directory, including custom attributes created on Letsignit. When your employees change one or more attributes, your directory is obviously not affected.
It often happens that employees make their email signature their own: custom format, bad fonts, colors inconsistent with the brand standards... all of this has an impact on your brand!
A consistent visual identity is considered authentic and outperforms a perceived weak one by 20%. And, your customers are 2.4 times more likely to buy your products.
With Letsignit, take back control over your brand identity by standardizing all your email signatures. Our tool has many features that allow you to customize your signatures by department, by audience or by subsidiary. Not to mention the possibility of carrying out campaigns within your email signatures thanks to our Campaign offer.
What is the user experience like for our employees?
In both cases:
In short, they have autonomy in their email signature, but you keep control on the field, signatures, and banners they can edit or use.
With our "multi-signature" feature, your employees can benefit from multiple email signatures. No technical manipulation is required. Thanks to our Add-in for Outlook or the desktop app, they can change their email signatures as they wish with just a few clicks.
Regarding the creation of email signatures, you can make several variations such as:
Everything has been thought of to go further in the personalization process based on the recipient of your emails.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
