The Next Wave of Sales Tech: Team Intelligence

It’s no secret that commercial teams often suffer from high attrition. The Great Resignation is just the latest skirmish in the larger battle to create organizations that are both efficient and attractive to crucial employees.

High employee churn doesn’t just tax company culture. It has a direct impact on both revenue and value creation for customers. In fact, every ramped sales rep who quits costs the company 150-200% of their annual salary. 

We don’t accept this revolving door as just part of the cost of doing business. Now, more than ever, companies have both the responsibility and opportunity to invest in scalable, systematic leadership aimed at supporting their employees. 

Bandaids (in the form of surveys, focus groups, and tweaks to 1:1s) can only go so far. Instead, it’s time to get to the heart of the issue. 

Focusing on the Heart of Your Commercial Team ❤️

Call us cheesy, but we use the word “heart” on purpose. 

Your go-to-market organization already has a “brain” in their CRM, intelligence, and lead scoring tools. You already have “muscle” in Sales Engagement tools like Outreach, Gong, or SalesLoft. 

But the “heart” of the organization—your people and your teams—is often left for last. At best, you’re piecing it together through disparate systems for development, management, compensation, 1:1s, and planning. 

We’ve operationalized the CRM. We’ve optimized the funnel. Are you pouring the same investment into the real heart of your organization? 

Let’s go back to attrition for a second: high employee churn in your go-to-market organization isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom of larger issues laying under the surface. It’s a symptom of stress, lack of predictability, and high failure rates. Two quick stats for you to consider:

• 42% of sales professionals don't meet their full earnings in a calendar year.
• 73% of sales professionals report feeling high stress on a weekly basis.

With changing employee expectations, your teams are starting to demand a more positive and supportive work environment. 

And (dare we say it?) rightly so. This isn’t some short-term problem that will go away once things settle down. It’s a large-scale, long-term challenge to leadership. Are you ready to respond to the challenge? 

Recognizing the Opportunity for Change

As we gear up to launch Rhythm, we spoke to sales leaders about what matters most to them today—and, more importantly, what matters to the people they manage.

“It’s harder than ever to know how our teams are feeling,” one sales leader told us. “How do I onboard them not only into their job but into the professional world? Without the right tools, people can get dejected and feel isolated in a new environment—especially if the hammer comes down on sales to produce extraordinary results.”

Today, sales leadership leans heavily on sales managers to ensure performance and quality by enforcing processes and giving sales reps what they need to be successful. But that approach is far from fair, both for sales managers and for individual reps. It’s less than systematic—and a far cry for the sustainable attention your entire team needs. It’s overly manual, unhealthily disconnected, and leaves room for reps (not to mention leads) to get lost in the shuffle. 

Tenured employees leave, new employees get hired, and the giant wheel of unnecessary operational costs turns on. 

Instead, the sales leaders we talked to are looking for solutions that will:

• Expand control without compromising guardrails and principles. They need a consistent manager cadence, centralized tracking of actions, automation for pulling both internal and external conversations, and the ability to track changes over time. 
  
  
• Create shared accountability between managers and team members. Leaders are bullish on the ability for employees to self-advocate and track their accomplishments over time. (“Every salesperson wants to be irreplaceable,” one sales leader told us, noting that documenting contributions can be a challenge.) Leaders are looking to take ambiguity out of career progression and, conversely, increase visibility of team members who need more attention. 

Overall, both frontline sellers and sales leaders would benefit from structured guidance and centralized action plans backed by real performance metrics. 

What Comes Next?

As we build Rhythm, we’re focused on creating a space that provides:

• Intelligent and integrated work planning that tames the chaos of being a rep or frontline managing a team.

• Centralized, shared, and integrated digital workspaces between reps and managers to track goals, milestones, and accolades.
• Integrated learning and development that lines up with rep and manager plans. 
• New and unique ways to stream and track sentiment in real-time without relying on lackluster surveys. 

But we know that large-scale shifts in organizational culture requires short-term changes. If digital transformation starts with incremental steps, we want to show that commercial teams can take those same first steps. 

This isn’t about adopting “just another SaaS tool”—it’s about revamping your entire approach to sales management, performance and internal career progression. It’s about getting the heart of your organization to where it needs to be for the marathon to come.