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Retention is often an operational Rubik’s Cube for sales leaders: matching up the right combination of personalities, compensation, culture, experience, strategy, and, of course, sales generation.
And like the Rubik’s Cube, in solving for retention, there are seemingly countless combinations of moves that can lead to the same desired outcome: a team that consistently hits sales goals. For Casey Halloran, CEO and co-founder of travel agency Costa Rican Vacations, that solution was the creation of an internal company currency.
“At the beginning of each semester, we hand out a fixed number of these. We call them ‘frog dollars,’ which we named after our company logo, which is a tree frog. In the old days, we designed it on Photoshop and actually printed the money. Now that we’re a 100%-virtual organization, we built a little digital ledger system, so I jokingly say we inadvertently invented bitcoin,” Halloran said.
The golden ratio
According to Halloran, sales is everything in the travel agency world, so creating great sales teams is essential. He has a team of 55 salespeople, and his philosophy of building sales teams, he said, can be summed up as: If you add an effective salesperson, you make more money. If you lose an effective salesperson, you make less money.”
The inspiration for “frog dollars” came from Halloran’s adherence to the one-to-one ratio of retention, where more sales leads to more sales—and higher revenues. Halloran wanted to add an extra incentive to motivate his employees while also helping them feel like they were growing within the company through affirmations other than sales.
Frog dollars are awarded after sales milestones or for consistent output and can be redeemed for rewards like electronics, hotel stays, TVs, and restaurant vouchers. The system has become a core part of the company culture.
“Whenever we do happiness surveys, [frog dollars] always rated as a top event, something that people really love,” Halloran said, “I know anecdotally it’s been aiding in retention because we have reps who hoard these for years, waiting to finally claim the big prize they’ve always wanted.”
Ribbit ribbit
Frog dollars are not just a bonus form of compensation at Costa Rican Vacations; the program also provides positive reinforcement that Halloran says has gone a long way.
“The human tendency in management is to look for problems and then to zap people,” Halloran said. “If you really want to keep people around, especially salespeople who are feelers, you better make them feel good.”
Jeff Hazard, vice president of US sales at accounting software company Xero, shares Halloran’s opinion that, despite the importance of compensation and status, strong culture and structure will always lead to the best outcomes.
“When you build a team, if you do it well, you do all the little things all the time, it’s like compounding interest. It’s small in the beginning, but over time it really gets larger and bigger, and it becomes really powerful and almost something like a good inertia,” Hazard said.
Incentivize recognition
Over the course of his 27-year sales career, Hazard has found that recognizing employee accomplishments has been the most effective way to keep retention up. In weekly meetings, he gives shoutouts acknowledging goals hit from the previous week, and the team sets new, reasonably attainable goals, starting a loop of gratification that generates team momentum.
Hazard also stressed having an eye for talent is paramount and says the first few months for any hire are more or less a trial period.
“I’ve probably hired over 500 people in my life, maybe more. I think if I have a 60 to 80% hit rate; that’s pretty good,” Hazard said. “There’s going to be some people it’s not a fit for and I think what'’ really important is when someone’s not a fit is that you find a way to move them out early. It’s better for them and it’s better for the organization.”
When given the choice between building around a team or building around a system that can replace people, Hazard said he prefers the continuity and reliability of a sustained team; that stability drives productivity, and that success in turn usually makes people want to stay.
“If you’re constantly making your people better, they want to stay because they’re like, ‘wait a minute, I’m way better than I was a year ago. And you know what, my leader is making me better, and I’m winning more,’” Hazard said.