As well as full time work since I was about 16, I have worked a number of part-time and secondary jobs. With all the companies I've worked for both large and small I've seen an interesting pattern. Good employees keep getting assigned more work without getting paid any more money, and eventually leave. When they leave this workload is spread thin across the rest of the work-force with virtually zero handover.
I remember doing tech support and customer service for a telco. When I got promoted into the sales team I left behind a number of additional responsibilities. The ones I can remember were, Training new staff, Developing training material, Gathering requirements for a new CRM, Responding to complaints and escalations and Assisting with interviewing new support staff.
No single person took up more than one of those responsibilities in my wake, and some were abandoned entirely. I'm not saying I'm a "great" employee per se, because I was nothing compared to a colleague of mine. She organised all the social/'company culture' including events, birthdays, games, competitions, etc and she took on responding to complaints and escalations but was already rostering, standing in for team leaders, taking care of inwards correspondence, answering all e-mail queries and I'm certain even more.
The average staff member on the other hand simply took calls and that was the extent of their duties. We happily took on extra responsibility (for no extra money) because we were bored. Our jobs were too easy. That's why I quickly moved into sales and my other colleague left the job as soon as she finished university.
The problem with great employees is that they don't want to be doing what they are great at. They want to take on the next challenge that they can be great at. And if they get bored they get poached (by another department or another company).
That too is the problem with great sales people. They build up massive pipelines, establish strong relationships and loyal clients. And when they leave it all disappears with them.
So how do you utilise great talent, while simultaneously keeping them engaged? The first thing is that you recognise that they won't be doing that job forever. Once you realise that you can start preparing for their departure from day 1. Once they have mastered a new task they've been assigned you need to somehow retain the knowledge they've acquired. Have them record the details of the business process somewhere (company intranet, training manual, etc.).
Now with the knowledge ready to pass on and they are starting to get bored it's time to assign them another task. Once both tasks start to get burdened assign them a less great employee to assist them. The idea is that this 'assistant' will soon replace them.
This does two things : 1) it gives less skilled employees the opportunity to upskill, 2) it stops great employees from getting bored.
Now you need to speak to your stellar performers on a regular basis to find out which tasks they truly enjoy doing and let them keep working on it. You also need a career path for them. Find out what they want to do and keep giving them tasks that take them in that direction. And when it comes time to salary reviews make sure you give them a small boost proportional to the work that they are doing. And try to provide an incentive for any revenue generating work that they do.
How does this apply to sales people?
You can take advantage of this in various ways:
1) Train junior sales people by giving them exposure to great sales people
2) Give great sales people help with admin, research and non-revenue generating activity
3) Preserve the industry knowledge the sales person develops by passing it on to a junior
4) If that sales person leaves there is someone who is already intimately familiar with their pipeline who can step up
5) You can have more people in the company developing the relationships with clients, so that when the sales person leaves they don't take all their clients with them
Now all of the above things take a lot of work and many companies can't afford to have additional headcount to help with tasks that seem trivial. But I would consider it insurance. When great people leave their workload falls on other people who are not prepared for it. As these people get more to do they become stressed and unhappy with their role. Eventually even your average employees start to leave.
I've seen a small number of key resignations have massive knock-on effects for companies. To the CEO or the CFO this would probably be nothing more than a small blip in a P&L statement. But what is lost is the opportunity cost, knowledge/understanding and morale.
And when the people affected by these problems are in a revenue generating capacity it can at best stifle growth and at worst vastly reduce performance.
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