TL;DR
The fully-loaded cost of losing a commercial services sales rep runs 150% to 200% of their on-target earnings, not the $115,000 figure most articles still quote from a 2012 study.
Field-sales turnover is steep. 41% of teams report losing half their reps or more in a single year (SPOTIO, 2026).
Median sales turnover is 40%, but 16 points of that are promotions, so true departures sit closer to 24% (The Bridge Group, 2025).
The largest hidden cost is ramp time. A new rep can take six months or more to pay off in commercial field sales, and average tenure runs under two years.
With quota attainment at record lows, a struggling rep is often a market problem, not a bad hire.
Keeping and equipping a rep almost always costs less than replacing one.
Quiet Signals That a Rep is Leaving
Usually it starts with a feeling. A rep who used to fill the pipeline goes quiet. The numbers slip. Activities on the accounts they chased for months go untouched, and the ones already on the books carry them through another cycle.
You tell yourself it's a slow stretch. Then the two weeks' notice lands in your inbox, and the quiet finally makes sense.
By the time that email arrives, the cost of sales rep turnover has already been running for weeks. Not the recruiter invoice. Their territory going cold.
The buildings nobody is walking into. The relationships that were finally warming up, now cooling back to room temperature and losing interest.
Most teams never put a number on any of it.
Before you decide what to do about that, you need to know what it actually costs. And, the first number you will find if you Google “the cost of rep turnover” is wrong - cause it’s almost 15 years old.
41% of field-sales teams report annual rep turnover of 50% or higher, and only about one in six keep it under 10%. (SPOTIO State of Field Sales, 2026)
Median annual sales turnover sits at 40%, made up of 11% voluntary departures, 13% involuntary, and 16% promotions. (The Bridge Group, 2025)
Roughly 42% of employees who quit say their manager or company could have prevented it. (Gallup via HR.com, 2025)
What Does Losing a Sales Rep Actually Cost?
Search this question and almost every answer hands you the same figure: about $115,000 per lost rep. It shows up in blog posts, in sales decks, and in the AI summaries at the top of the results page.
It is also close to useless for any sales manager trying to figure out how much it truly costs.
That number traces to a single DePaul University study reported in 2012, and it has never been re-run. Adjusted for inflation alone, it clears $150,000 today.
More important, it was a cross-industry average pulled from sales floors that look nothing like a commercial services team working buildings across a territory.
Current research frames the cost differently, and more accurately.
The Bridge Group's 2025 research puts the fully-loaded cost of a departure at 150% to 200% of the rep's on-target earnings.
That figure is a multiple, not a fixed dollar amount, so it scales to your own comp and does not rot with inflation.
It also captures what the recruiter invoice never does: the months of sub-quota output while a new rep ramps, the pipeline that stalls when a relationship changes hands, and the manager hours spent hiring instead of coaching.
For a rep earning $100,000 in OTE, that puts one departure between $150,000 and $200,000.
So the real question is not the sticker price. It is whether your turnover rate is feeding that number faster than you think.
Cost of sales rep turnover: the total financial impact of a salesperson leaving and being replaced. It covers recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity while the replacement ramps, pipeline that stalls during the handoff, and the manager time pulled away from coaching the rest of the team.
Fully-loaded turnover cost: the complete cost of one departure across every budget it touches, usually expressed as a multiple of the rep's on-target earnings (OTE). Current research puts it at 150% to 200%.
What's a Normal Sales Turnover Rate in 2026?
Now that the year is past its midpoint, sales managers are comparing notes on how many reps they have lost. The field-sales numbers are higher than most will say out loud.
SPOTIO's 2026 State of Field Sales survey found that 41% of field teams report annual rep turnover of 50% or higher, and only about one in six keep it in the single digits.
That might line up with what you are seeing on your own team. It might not. The point is not where you land against the benchmark. It’s that the seat going cold and the territory going unworked is the part nobody put a dollar figure on.
The composition matters more than the headline.
Bridge Group's data puts median sales turnover at 40%, but that splits into 11% voluntary departures, 13% involuntary, and 16% promotions.
A promotion is a win. It also empties a seat you pay to refill and re-ramp - which could take up to 9 months according to most companies.
So if you are asking about talent your team “failed to keep,” your real departure rate is closer to 24% (according to industry benchmarks).
If you are asking how often you are paying to fill a role, it is the full 40%. Both are true, and they answer different questions.
Where the Real Cost Hides
The recruiter fee is the cheap part - I know that’s hard to hear but it’s a fixed cost.
The expensive part never lands on one budget line, which is exactly why leadership tends to underestimate it.
Picture the cost as an iceberg. Above the waterline sit the visible items: the job board spend, the agency fee, the sign-on bonus. Below it sits everything that actually does the damage. The table below maps the two:
Cost component | Financial impact | Visible or hidden |
Recruiting | 15% to 25% of first-year OTE | Visible |
Onboarding and training | $5,000 to $40,000 per rep | Partially hidden |
Ramp-time revenue loss | Several months of sub-quota output | Hidden |
Pipeline and deal disruption | Deals stall or go cold mid-funnel | Hidden |
Manager overhead | Weeks of time diverted from coaching | Hidden |
And all of that is before we put a price on the knowledge that just walked out the door.
The building history, the internal champion who loves your team, the gatekeeper who finally started taking the rep's calls, the quote that was one conversation from closing.
That knowledge rarely lives anywhere but the rep's head, which is one reason so many field sales teams have moved off generic CRMs toward systems that keep the account context in one place.
But, there is a second-order cost. One exit prompts the reps who stay to re-evaluate, and outside recruiters use the visible movement as an opening.
The largest of these hidden costs is time. Specifically, the months before a replacement pays for themselves.
How Long Before a New Rep Pays Off?
The fastest-ramping sales roles in the country still take a full quarter to reach baseline. Most commercial services businesses take, at minimum, two.
Once again, Bridge Group's 2025 research puts average sales ramp at 3.0 months, the lowest reading since 2010, with median tenure at 1.9 years. Those figures come from inside sales, where a new rep inherits a lead queue.
A commercial services outside rep works a geography, a set of relationships, needs to know the equipment, and track territory data/ building history. That ramp commonly runs six months or longer.
Run the treadmill math: you spend roughly half a year making a rep productive, then get somewhere under two years of full output before the seat is at risk again.
This is where the right tools speed up ramp times and make new reps hit baseline faster.
One Southwest HVAC company cut new-rep ramp times from six-to-nine months down to two-to-three. In their Sales Director's words, "Since Convex gets them talking to the right people right away, we've reduced that window to just two to three months."
They treated that as a hiring argument as much as a sales one, proof to prospective reps that they could reach wins faster.
When a new rep picks up a territory, the property, ownership, and permit intelligence for those buildings is already there, so they spend week one in front of the right accounts instead of spending months learning which buildings even matter. That kind of territory visibility is what turns a cold start into a fast one.
Which lands every manager on the same hard question. Keep the rep who is struggling, or cut and start the clock over?
When Should You Keep a Rep, and When Should You Cut?
Attainment is falling for nearly everyone, which makes a struggling rep a coin flip between a bad hire and a hard year.
According to Bridge Group's 2026 research, 48% of reps hit annual quota, down from 51% in 2024 and the lowest figure it has recorded.
Sales-development attainment sits at 60%, also a record low.
More reps feel like candidates to cut as the market moves and reps do not. But, cutting on instinct means eating a full replacement cost to maybe land right back where you started.
But there is an interesting piece of information that we haven’t looked at yet.
Gallup found that roughly 42% of employees who quit said their manager or company could have prevented it. This makes the decision to cut or coach a bit easier.
Consistent coaching and assessment will clearly show you whether you’re working with a rep who’s improving or pulling away. The reps worth keeping are the ones who thoughtfully put your standards to work in their daily workflows - and improve under coaching. The ones to cut aren’t willing to put in the work and are as good as gone already.
But to know for certain, you have to see key sales insights that don’t show up in a traditional CRM.
As Matt Koenig, General Manager at Haynes Mechanical Systems, put it, managers who can "clearly see the kinds of buildings new reps are targeting" can "offer better coaching about who they should be going after."
Visibility turns "cut them" into "steer them off the wrong accounts before bad habits set," and a clear 30-60-90 plan tells you which way to lean well before the probationary deadline.
Before you make that call either way, put a real number on what it costs - this will give you a clear picture of how keeping vs. cutting will truly impact your team.
How to Calculate Your Own Turnover Cost
Three inputs, five minutes. The number tends to surprise people.
You need three things: your team size, your average rep OTE, and your annual turnover rate.
Multiply headcount by your turnover rate to get reps lost per year, then multiply that by the fully-loaded cost of a departure, which research puts at 150% to 200% of OTE.
Here is a worked example on a $100,000 OTE assumption. Swap in your own figures and the shape holds:
Input | Example value |
Team size | 10 reps |
Average OTE | $100,000 |
Annual turnover rate | 30% |
Reps lost per year | 3 |
Cost per departure (150% to 200% of OTE) | $150,000 to $200,000 |
Annual turnover cost | $450,000 to $600,000 |
One caution on the rate you plug in. If you are budgeting to keep seats covered, use your full seat-coverage rate rather than only voluntary departures, because a promoted rep still leaves a role you pay to refill.
Map that math against how your reps are spread across the market first, and a clear sales coverage model will tell you where a single loss hurts most.
Once that figure is in front of you, the money you would spend to prevent it starts to look small.
Why Tools and Training Cost Less Than Turnover
Retention spend is a number you can plan for. Turnover is a recurring one you mostly cannot see.
Reps leave for reasons you can often address before the resignation lands. No visible path forward. No development. Pay quietly slipping, which the data backs up: median sales-development OTE has grown about 8% over 14 years against 44% inflation over the same stretch, per The Bridge Group.
Investing in tools and training reads as cost on a spreadsheet. Measured against the refill-and-re-ramp cycle, it is the cheaper line.
Commercial contractors already know this instinct. Their top CRM goal is customer retention at 58% (ServiceTitan, 2025). They apply the keep-what-you-have logic to customers. The same logic applies to reps.
The tooling piece matters because it protects the team from a single point of failure.
When building intelligence lives in the platform instead of one rep's memory, a departure does not reset the territory to zero, and the reps who stay keep moving.
As Branden Jovaag, Sales Manager at Climate Engineering, described the shift to a single pipeline view, it "brings more accountability and more awareness to what's going on."
That awareness is the difference between absorbing a loss and being blindsided by one, and it is the practical case for treating sales intelligence as retention infrastructure rather than a prospecting add-on.
Which leaves one number worth running before you decide anything.
The One Turnover Number Most Teams Never Run
Take your seat-coverage rate, your average OTE, and the 150%-to-200% multiple.
Multiply them. That is the figure to weigh against the cost of keeping and equipping the reps you already have. You do not need a benchmark to act on your own math, and the math usually points in the same direction.
The stale $115,000 number was never barely relevant - and definitely didn’t match your comp or team. The one you just calculated is.
If you want to see how commercial services sales reps use tools like Convex to ramp faster, and keep territory knowledge in one place, so a rep leaving does not mean starting over .Schedule a demo of Convex today.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does sales rep turnover affect customer retention?
Buyers build relationships with people, not brands. When a rep leaves, the accounts they managed get handed to someone the customer does not know, and some quietly drift to a competitor. The cost of a departure includes the accounts that leave with it.
What is the fully-loaded cost of replacing a sales rep?
Current research puts it at 150% to 200% of the rep's OTE, covering recruiting, ramp-time productivity loss, stalled pipeline, and manager time. For a rep earning $100,000 in OTE, that is $150,000 to $200,000 per departure.
Is 40% turnover normal?
It is more common than most sales managers and leaders would like to admit. The Bridge Group's 2025 data puts median sales turnover at 40%, but 16 points of that are promotions, so true departures sit closer to 24%. Field-sales teams run higher, with 41% reporting turnover of 50% or more (SPOTIO, 2026).
How do you calculate turnover cost?
Multiply your headcount by your annual turnover rate to get reps lost per year, then multiply that by the fully-loaded cost per departure, which research puts at 150% to 200% of OTE.
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