Sales Personnel Attrition Control and Retention – An Integrated Framework for Lifestyle Retailers in India (RSPR-LS)

Abstract

A majority of organized brick-and-mortar lifestyle retailers in India believe that the cost of Sales Personnel (SP) attrition is insignificant, and this belief has made lifestyle retailers ignore the importance of SP attrition control and retention activities (SACR). Mathematically it may be true that the cost of SP attrition is very low as the average salary of the SP is 5.46 times lesser than that of Non-Sales Personnel (NSP) in the organization, but the fact is a majority of employees in a retail organization who are closest to the market and the consumers are the SP even though they are at the lower levels of retailer’s organizational hierarchy. We determinedly believe that the key to success is in identifying who is closer to the market and the consumer and ensuring such employees (if performing well) are consistently motivated to stay in the organization for a longer duration. The literature, exploratory qualitative primary findings, and empirical evaluation indicate that the existing SACR model of select organized brick-and-mortar lifestyle retailers in India is irrational as it seriously fails to understand the magnitude of the negative impact that is moderated by higher SP attrition rates on the overall store’s revenue and long-term firm’s sustainability. This study was not limited to just evaluating the existing SACR model of retailers in the study and recommending a theoretical framework. Once the RSPR-LS framework was designed that is built on proven theories in the literature, findings and insights from the exploratory phase of this study, and recommendations from previous research works relevant for lifestyle retailing in India, we have experimented the RSPR-LS framework on one of the ten lifestyle retailers in the study over 24 months’ at over 25 percent stores of the select retailer. Experimentation results demonstrate that these stores which have gone through the treatment have shown 37.59 percent improvement in walk-ins conversion rate, 87.54 percent improvement in consumer’s repeat store visit rate that resulted in 20.23 percent improvement in the overall store revenue and 2.00 times improvement in the overall store profit on account of 21.35 percentage points improvement in SP retention rate thereby providing validity and reliability of the proposed RSPR-LS framework in the field.