---
title: "The Camp Is Iron, the Soldiers Flow Like Water: Four Metrics for Managing a Sales Force"
description: "For a sales-driven or marketing-driven enterprise, the success of sales force management almost determines the success of the company. All business performance relies on salespeople, who complete the final step of converting the company's services and products into value; without this step, all prior efforts are worthless. The sales force is the corporate army on the front lines, and salespeople are our corporate soldiers. As such, they share the military's characteristic: the camp is iron, but the soldiers flow like water."
author: "张思全"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2015-06-16"
language: "en"
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# The Camp Is Iron, the Soldiers Flow Like Water: Four Metrics for Managing a Sales Force

> For a sales-driven or marketing-driven enterprise, the success of sales force management almost determines the success of the company. All business performance relies on salespeople, who complete the final step of converting the company's services and products into value; without this step, all prior efforts are worthless. The sales force is the corporate army on the front lines, and salespeople are our corporate soldiers. As such, they share the military's characteristic: the camp is iron, but the soldiers flow like water.

For a sales-driven or marketing-driven enterprise, the success of sales force management almost determines the success of the company. All business performance relies on salespeople, who complete the final step of converting the company's services and products into value; without this step, all prior efforts are worthless. At the same time, the sales force is the corporate army charging on the front lines, and salespeople are our corporate soldiers. Since they are the corporate army and soldiers, they also share the military's characteristics: the camp is iron, but the soldiers flow like water. Consequently, the sales force exhibits the following traits: 1. Highly youthful; 2. Highly fluid; 3. Highly pressured; 4. Highly quantified; 5. Highly passionate and energetic. Based on these five traits, we can guide sales force management with the following four metrics.

New Power Ratio: Our army recruits a batch of new soldiers each year to bring vitality to the troops. Similarly, a company needs to recruit new people each year. Newcomers bring vitality and different thinking, and their arrival can also stimulate our veteran team members. Shenzhen Vanke has a New Power Club that recruits a batch of new college graduates from universities each year, placing them in various departments to inject fresh blood, increase departmental vitality, and cultivate and reserve talent. This not only meets departmental needs but also aligns with human resources development. It is easy to imagine that an army without any newcomers would be lifeless and lack vitality.

What is the appropriate ratio to recruit? How should it be determined? In my view, it is certainly not the more the better. In addition to the new power needed for newly added sales positions, our existing teams should also ensure a 10% to 20% influx of newcomers. Such a ratio can also satisfy the company's elimination mechanism and talent cultivation mechanism. Since they are newcomers, we should start with those without any social experience, such as the many college graduates each year. They lack social work experience and find it hard to get jobs, which is exactly what we need. Talent is cultivated; only those we cultivate ourselves are more likely to serve our purposes.

Position Change and Promotion Rate: Although sales work is challenging, it is also a tedious grassroots job. Staying in one position for too long can lead to boredom and a desire to explore new positions or fields. Correspondingly, if employees cannot see future promotion prospects or a larger stage provided by the company for salespeople, they will give up. Position promotions or changes within the sales force are excellent incentives for employees. A salesperson with mediocre performance in region A might achieve great results in another region; someone without a knack for channel management might have unique strengths in promotion management. At the right time, we can cleverly use job changes to stimulate the passion of appropriate salespeople and leverage their strengths. In a sales force, there must be some salespeople who get promoted; if no one is promoted, all salespeople will feel hopeless. Even if only one person is promoted, everyone will feel hope. There are also indirect methods of promotion, such as enjoying the basic treatment of a supervisor while still handling sales representative duties, or changing from being responsible for a county-level market to a prefecture-level market. An ideal employee change and promotion rate is around 10% to 12%, with the change rate at 6% to 8% and the promotion rate at 4% to 6%. A reasonable employee change and promotion rate can effectively stimulate the passion of the entire sales force.

Employee Elimination Rate: Another way to stimulate the sales force is to implement an elimination system. The elimination system is actually a good mechanism, but some companies treat it merely as a formality. Elimination means removing unqualified personnel, not just the last one. People differ; often an employee with strong strengths in some areas has weaknesses in others. Perhaps through performance appraisal, their results are not ideal, but we should not eliminate such people. Some employees are "yes men" everywhere, with mediocre performance, and these might be the ones we should truly eliminate. The criteria for eliminating an employee should be very complex, and companies need to study this carefully. At the same time, the elimination rate should be controlled within a certain range. If every employee is excellent, eliminating someone due to the system seems contrary to human resources principles. Eliminating only the last employee has little effect on the vast majority of salespeople, because there will always be someone at the bottom. However, a very high elimination rate will inevitably cause dissatisfaction and affect the morale of many excellent employees. For most companies today, an elimination rate of 3% to 5% is normal. Of course, the specific situation should be determined based on the company's own circumstances. But implementing an elimination system will inevitably stimulate everyone's work passion and motivate salespeople to complete their tasks.

Excellent Employee Turnover Rate: Retaining excellent talent and eliminating unqualified employees is the basic rule of any company's talent management. It is hard to let go of employees, but it must be done; yet seeing excellent employees leave is even more painful and undesirable. Therefore, the turnover rate of excellent employees is also an important indicator of the success of a sales force.

Employee turnover is natural; every company experiences it, even the best companies in the world, including those considered the best places to work. But for a company to develop, it must have excellent employees as support. A major responsibility of the HR department and sales managers is to retain excellent employees and minimize the turnover rate of excellent employees. It would be great to control the turnover rate at 0%, but not every company or sales force can achieve that. Generally, the lower the turnover rate of excellent employees, the better. Based on sales personnel performance appraisal data, if a company adopts the 20/80 principle, the turnover rate should not exceed 5%; if it adopts the 40/40/20 principle, the turnover rate must be controlled within 10%.

Through these four metrics, the stability and fluidity of the sales team are fully ensured. Excellent employees are retained through position changes and promotions, becoming the backbone of the company, while unqualified employees are eliminated and leave, and new power is recruited to fill the gaps. As the saying goes, "Flowing water does not stagnate; well-tended branches do not clog." Only such a sales team can have strong combat effectiveness and vitality.

Extending this, we can apply these four metrics to all corporate human resources management, building a corporate army that truly forms "an iron camp with flowing soldiers."

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