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Burn-out is a real threat to sales teams throughout the United States. Sales professionals’ natural drive to succeed and win, combined with increasing pressures from high-performing companies and the ever-faster pace of information and technological change, can combine to cost a sales professional their focus, creativity, or even their mental and physical health.

Here’s how you can prevent burnout in your sales employees, and what to do if you notice it happening.

Create time to do nothing.

It sounds paradoxical: The best way to get more from your team is to order them to do less. Yet the science supports this approach. Study after study reveals that workers do better work and do it more efficiently if they have sufficient time to rest and recharge during the day.

Whether it’s telling your staff to leave their email till morning or providing a few hours a week for them to pursue passion projects, creating space and time for sales professionals to focus on something other than their sales goals is essential to their performance and their health.

Incorporate burnout prevention into your compensation package.

As in every field, top sales professionals expect competitive compensation. But just as your company’s products offer more benefits than merely their price tag, your compensation package should offer more benefits than merely a high salary.

There are many ways to augment a compensation package with benefits that help manage stress and prevent or address burnout. Remote work options, flex time and telecommuting are popular options, but so are less common benefits like gym memberships or childcare subsidies. These benefits can be relatively inexpensive for employers, yet do a world of good for staff seeking to maintain their professional momentum.

Find people to lighten the load.

If your entire team is showing symptoms of burnout, chances are good that their collective workload is more than they can handle, even when they support one another in carrying it. In this case, bringing on another sales professional to share the load may be the best way to prevent burnout of the entire team.

At SMR Group, our recruiters specialize in connecting our clients in the biotech, pharmaceutical and medical device industries with some of the best available sales and marketing talent. Contact us today to learn more.


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