The short version. When a great salesperson resigns, it’s almost never just about the money. Money is the scoreboard, not the game. What actually drives retention is what’s going on inside their head, mapped neatly across five social drivers: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. In this episode of Lead to Grow, Tommy Sim breaks down the SCARF model, the basketball-team analogy that explains it, and seven practical things great sales leaders quietly do every month to keep their best people from quitting.
Listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Episode runs 33 minutes.
Almost every business owner has told themselves the same story. A good salesperson resigns. They mention a bigger offer. The leader concludes it was about the money. It rarely is.
“When a salesperson leaves and says it was for more money, don’t just take it on face value. More often than not, money is the justification. The real reason is the environment they experienced before they even took that call.” Tommy Sim
The on-the-surface logic is hard to argue with. Salespeople generate revenue. They get a share of it. They chase commission. They spend it on cars and watches and holidays. They leave for a bigger offer. So of course it’s about the money.
It’s not. Money is a scoreboard. The game is something else.
Tommy uses a basketball analogy that lands hard. Imagine someone tells you that you scored 20 points today, but you didn’t actually score them. They were just allocated to you on the scoreboard.
Technically the result looks good. Would that make you want to keep turning up?
For almost everyone, no. The score matters because it reflects something real. That we made a difference. That we used our abilities. That we were in the right team, in the right league, doing what we’re best at.
The fancy car, the watch, the holiday. They’re not the point. They’re signals. They tell the salesperson and the people around them: I’m winning, I’m capable, I’m where I should be. Take away those signals and the money does very little work.
David Rock’s SCARF model is the cleanest framework Tommy has come across for explaining the underlying mechanics. Our brains constantly scan for social threats and rewards. Five drivers decide whether someone leans into an idea, a leader, or an organisation, or starts quietly working against it.
| Driver | The question the brain is asking | What it looks like in sales |
|---|---|---|
| Status | How do I compare to others here? | Pay, title, recognition, who gets consulted, who gets the big accounts. |
| Certainty | Do I know what to expect tomorrow? | Constant commission changes, shifting performance messages, unstable career paths. |
| Autonomy | Can I make the calls in my own patch? | Sudden micromanagement, activity-tracking that feels punitive, controls without context. |
| Relatedness | Am I in or out of the group? | Time on the road, “the rest of the business doesn’t get my world”, feeling like an island. |
| Fairness | Am I being treated fairly? | Account allocation, workload, who gets the inbound leads, how colleagues are treated. |
When those things are supported, people engage, contribute and cooperate. When they’re threatened, people become defensive, resistant, or disengaged. Often without consciously realising why.
The framework is the diagnosis. These are the things to do about it.
Tommy is firm on this one. The right kind of monthly 1:1 is not a pipeline review. It’s a separate conversation about the person.
“On a scale of one to 10, how much have you been enjoying your work lately? Whatever number they give you, explore it. What are the good things that make it up to a seven? What’s holding it back from being a 10?”
Resignations look sudden to the leader. They almost never are. Salespeople have usually been checking out mentally for months. Monthly 1:1s catch the signals before they harden into a decision.
Recognition is free, relatively unlimited, and most leaders don’t use it. The trick is specificity.
Tommy describes a moment where a salesperson landed a significant deal after months of work and brought it to the leadership team. The response was “good work”. Nothing else.
Recognition isn’t about making people feel good. It’s about reinforcing the behaviour you want to see again. Notice the behaviour, name the impact, choose the right setting. Make it proportionate. Match it to their self-identity. And work alongside them on the big deals so you actually have something to recognise.
Incentives are a double-edged sword. They can support retention if they’re attractive compared to the market. They can destroy fairness if one person gets easy accounts and big commissions while another grinds for half of it.
Three rules:
The two common mistakes:
The better path: define multiple levels of salesperson with real, tangible differences. Different job titles. Different salary bands. Senior meetings. Mentor roles. Internal and external industry expert positioning. Mentors are different from managers. Mentors share knowledge and guide others without owning that person’s performance. That’s a much smaller leap for a senior salesperson than full people leadership.
“Build them up so that everybody wants to poach them, then treat them so well that they never want to leave.”
None of the above works if the salesperson is trying to operate inside a system that’s fundamentally broken. The leads aren’t there. The CRM is messy. Marketing collateral is outdated. The sales process is unclear.
Tommy lays out an eight-point audit. Your answers should be “no” to all eight:
Every “yes” is the business quietly showing the salesperson the exit.
Tommy calls this the “doctor in the small town” phenomenon. A doctor who moves to a small country town isn’t just another person. They become the doctor. Trusted. Visible. Not interchangeable.
Compare that to a doctor working in a huge hospital system, one of hundreds. Same work, very different psychology.
Sales teams feel exactly the same difference. When accounts get reassigned frequently, when commission keeps changing, when leadership only talks targets, when the company takes credit for wins and the salesperson takes the blame for losses, people start thinking, “this place will keep going whether I’m here or not.” Once that thought lands, leaving becomes very easy to justify.
The fix: treat every salesperson like the small-town doctor with their clients. Real ownership of accounts. Regular consultation on what they see in the market. Wins felt across the business. Internal teams treating the salesperson like an internal client.
This is the one that can undo everything else. Backstabbing within the team. Public humiliation in meetings. Dressing someone down in front of others. Assigning blame when a deal falls over. Leadership making crazy promises in the market and pushing the pressure onto the salesperson.
It doesn’t need to be a repeated pattern. Sometimes one moment is enough.
“It’s like an injury to their brain. It’s like being punched in the face emotionally. They still show up physically, but psychologically they’re gone.”
Protecting psychological safety isn’t about being nice. It’s about protecting the environment that allows high performers to stay and do their best work.
Lead to Grow explores the people principles behind high-performing businesses. Hosted by Tommy Sim, Managing Director of Inject HR, the podcast focuses on leadership, performance, culture and decision-making, with practical insights leaders can apply immediately. New episodes are released regularly. Follow the show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or subscribe on YouTube.
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