How Team Burnout Impacts Your Customers
I was talking to a senior client account manager recently, Jennifer, who works at one of the nations leading digital marketing firms as the lead on some of her companies biggest clients. Jennifer is one of those people who is intensely organized, wants to get everything right, communicates with clarity, and is just a generally driven person - professionally and personally. Jennifer is rigorous about working out at least 5-days a week, usually for long runs in the morning.
As impressive as Jennifer is, I could sense stress and worry in her voice and how she carried herself. She just seemed a bit tentative in the words she used, kept saying how tired she feels, and how much work she has to do which feels never ending. It was clear Jennifer was burned out, but felt trapped that all the work to be done wouldn’t allow her to take a break. On top of this, Jennifer feels like she’s the only one that truly understands her customers and what they need, so even if she did take a break, there was nobody else to take care of things. She’d end up coming back to a pile of work that would only make things worse. While I don’t know if Jennifer was actively looking for a new job, I can guarantee that if someone approached her about a new job opportunity, she’d most certainly be open to the discussion.
Gartner recently released some research about burnout, or as they call it, Sales Drag. While this research was done in the context of salespeople, there’s no doubt these insights are applicable to anyone - and is critically important for anyone in a customer facing role. This includes project managers, client service team members, technicians, salespeople, account managers, etc. In this report, it shared that up to 90% of employees report some degree of burnout - which shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Most all of us have faced some level of burnout, especially over the last few years during and coming out of the pandemic. More specifically, the research showed that 47% of people report “high drag” which is defined as feeling emotionally drained to the point that it’s getting in the way of their performance. This cohort of high drag people are 40% less productive their low drag peers, and 70% of them are actively job hunting compared to only 7% of their low drag peers.
What also needs to be considered is the impact that burnout has on customers. I sat in on a client calls with Jennifer, and while she was clearly buttoned up and presented well, what I didn’t see was the energy, confidence, and creative thinking that I knew was deep inside her. Her manager told me that she used to be a star, but something was off lately. When a team member is feeling good about their job, and feels well balanced in their personal and professional demands and priorities, they serve their clients better.
Serving clients at its very core is about genuinely helping customers solve problems, and then creating clarity and confidence in the decisions they are making. This can be small steps early in the customer relationship to help them see they have a problem that can be solved, proactively offering up ideas that the client hadn’t even thought about, and keeping momentum through effective follow-up. Later in the relationship it can mean helping them gain buy-in from their superiors, creating a clear implementation plan that they believe in, or holding firm on value to minimize unnecessary discounting. The energy it takes to do those things well is radically diminished when burnout sets in.
All organizations spend time working on methods to increase their win rates, bring better products to market, improving their marketing efforts to generate more leads, or going through training to level up everyone’s skills. While these are certainly important, and always will be, make sure you’re also spending time dedicated to assessing your teams levels of energy or burnout. It may be having a bigger impact on your sales results than you realize.
Depending on the size of your team, you currently have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people in Jennifer’s situation. High performance, highly proven people that just need some extra attention to help them prioritize their time, feel supported, and encouraged to take a break when they need it. Not only will it improve business results, it will better serve your customers needs, and bring people like Jennifer more joy, satisfaction, and happiness.