The Real Reason New Team Members Quit Isn’t the Money

You assume the team member who goes quiet is dealing with a money problem. So you offer a bigger bonus, a better lead source, one more script. Sometimes that works. Often it doesn’t, because the actual reason people drift out of a business rarely shows up on the compensation plan at all. Zach Forsh, the director of customer success, spent his days on the phones and the tickets long enough to see the real pattern underneath the complaints, and what he found reduces to a shape simple enough to draw on a napkin.

What actually makes a new team member quit before they’ve even started?

Zach calls it the formula for more, and it has exactly three points: relationships, money, and opportunity. Relationships sit at the top for a reason. Most new marketers get so comfortable staring at clicks and conversions that they forget every single one of those numbers is a person with a name, a morning routine, and a reason they signed up in the first place.

• Relationships: picture every new sign-up as if they’d pulled a chair up right next to you, laptop open, waiting on you specifically.
• Money: the plain act of making it, the number someone names when you ask what they’re chasing.
• Opportunity: what that number is actually for, the freedom and the people it lets them take care of.

Zach’s own method is not complicated. He gets to know people on a personal level before he ever talks business. He mentioned Vanessa, one of the corporate trainers who manages the blog, and the shift he watched once he stopped treating her like a job title and started treating her like a person: the persona most people wear when they’re uncomfortable dropped away, and what was underneath was someone more driven, not less.

Dave is about three inches wide and seven miles deep on relationships.

That line got used to describe David Wood’s own blog, which by the account given on stage has had some of the weakest conversion numbers in the company’s history. Dave isn’t the conversion expert in the room. What actually produces his results is depth with people, not width across a funnel. He builds rapport fast, finds what actually drives someone in a single conversation, and gets you laughing before you’ve noticed you’re laughing. As Jonathan Cronstedt put it on stage, reviving an old cliché on purpose because it’s still true: “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Why does the richest person in the room still need a second driving factor?

Here’s where the triangle gets useful instead of just tidy. Money and opportunity get treated as the same thing constantly, and they aren’t. Money is the transaction. Opportunity is the reason the transaction matters, the retirement it funds for someone else, the freedom it hands back to you, whatever the number was always standing in for. Zach’s own answer, when asked, wasn’t about a lifestyle. It was about the people who raised him getting to finally rest.

You can hand someone the exact number they said they wanted and still watch them stall out if nobody ever helped them name what that number was actually for. That’s the part a compensation plan can’t do on its own. It takes an actual conversation, which loops back to the same point sitting at the top of the triangle: relationship first, because relationship is what surfaces the real answer.

What do you do when a team member drifts toward a detour?

Zach’s closing image was a highway. Picture the business as a road the company keeps paved, wide enough for people to move as fast or as slow as they want, built so everyone has a real shot at reaching the end of it. New team members don’t usually leave the highway on purpose. They spot something that looks like a shortcut, a different traffic source, a shinier tactic, and drift toward it before anyone notices they’re gone.

The job isn’t to shame them for looking. It’s to rope them back toward the basics, gently and quickly, before the detour becomes the new default. That’s also the argument behind simplifying the core product line rather than adding to it: fewer places to wander off to, an easier path back when someone does.

None of this is guesswork on Zach’s end. His team tracks average ticket close time, average call time, and a feedback survey that flags unhappy interactions and routes them straight to someone more senior until the problem actually gets solved. The formula for more isn’t a slogan invented for a stage. It’s a pattern read off real data from thousands of real conversations, distilled down to the three things that predict whether someone stays.

Build that triangle into how you onboard your own team, in that order. Get the relationship right first. Let that relationship tell you what the money is actually for. Then keep an eye on the road for the moment someone starts looking at a detour, and bring them back before they take it.

The full session goes further than what’s above, including how the customer success team escalates an unhappy interaction until it’s actually resolved. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

When's the best time for a revolution? When? One, two, three. All right, all right, all right.

So, did we deliver on a power-packed and spectacular morning for you? Excellent, because we're not done yet. Go ahead and take your seats. We've got something that I am really excited about and it's something we've never actually done.

These are my favorite to do because it's fun to surprise you but before we do that, I want you guys to just bask for a moment in the compassion, strategy, heart, and wisdom that was already shared with you this morning from Ms. Tracy Walker, from my man Miguel, from Paul and Kimberly. You know, I continue to say that I have the easiest job in the world because the only thing I'm responsible for doing is getting to work with and find out how to do cool stuff for the people that we have in our field. That I love the opportunities that I have at these events to get to know you guys a little bit more and you see me that I basically work a half day, which is normally about 12 hours for me.

And what I'll normally do is when I'm not in here in front of you, I'm out there talking to you or I'm running into you in the halls or I'm, you know, I think the last meeting we had last night ended at right around 1.30 with a bunch of our affiliates. So, this for me is truly an opportunity to express my passion and I never ever want to have any event go by where I don't thank all of you for the opportunity to serve you. So, thank you. Now, one of the things that I am the most proud of is the growth and the synergy that our corporate team has been building over the time that I've been here.

And one of the things that I've heard from a lot of you is that you've wanted to get to know a little bit more about who we are, what we do and how we do it. And I wanted to also bring that in with a lens of having it be immediately. And I wanted to bring that in with a lens of having it be immediately. Because the reality of it is, we have data about how all of your businesses are performing.

One of the key things that I realized is, and you guys are about to be introduced to our director of customer success. His name is Zach. He's an unbelievable fireball of energy that has completely transformed our customer service experience, which for all of you, you know the customer experience in this business, is a part of marketing. It is a part of the success of the company.

So it's something that we take very seriously and continue to optimize. And it's something that Zach has done a magnificent job with. What we're going to do is we're just going to take a few brief moments and give you a view into what he has found to be the three key areas that prompt people to not feel great about being in a team, not feel great about the success that they're having. Essentially, what are the three most common points of struggle or failure so that our affiliates can know them and build them into your processes?

How powerful is that? That you can literally take the data that we aggregate across the whole company and build it into a process that's going to ensure that your team is as successful as possible from the word go. So I am incredibly excited to welcome to the stage our director of customer success, Zach Forsh. Come on, guys.

Get up. What's up? How y'all doing? What's going on, my man?

Looking good. Thanks, bro. All right. Go ahead and give them a one, two, three.

It's fun. All right. One, two, three. Now!

That is fun. It is. I know. I'm telling you.

Everyone that comes up here, it's a blast. So again, guys, what we want to cover with you here is we're going to be talking about what we have found to be the three most common areas that create stress and resistance for people in this business. And the good news is Zach's got the data to prove it. I do have the data.

Now, real quick, Jonathan, I wanted to ask one strategic question before moving forward. Totally. How does, do you guys like my bow tie? All right, all right.

Now we can move on, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can certainly tell you in front of everyone, the best thing to do for job security is dress better than your boss. That's really.

OK, OK. Awesome, awesome. OK, cool. So let's get started, shall we?

Yeah. All right. Move back one. There we go.

Team retention. I wanted to talk about team retention today. As Jonathan said before, my name is Zachary Forsh. I'm director of customer support.

I have the pleasure and really the honor of talking to many affiliates throughout the day. Our team handles multiple phone calls, multiple tickets, and that sort of thing. And so you end up with a sense of where we're at, a sense of a lot of good data. And so what I compiled, what we compiled here, is some three key points that if you make sure that your team members have these points covered, you can definitely keep people in your organization, in your team, and as top producers.

All right, those three points. Opportunity, money, and relationships. And I can't really remember bullet points too well, so I've made it into a nice little triangle for us. So you can go ahead and draw that.

The first one I wanted to focus on today that we wanted to focus on here is relationships. Long distance relationships never work. Or do they? What I want you guys to picture is every new sign-up that you guys have, I want you to picture as if they popped up in a chair right next to you with a laptop ready to go.

What sorts of questions would you ask him or her? What sorts of things would you discuss with them? How much more invested would you be into their personal life? The way that I put this into practice with my team is I really get to know them on a personal level.

All right. So I'm going to give you an example of what that creates. And I'll give you an example. One of our corporate trainers is actually Vanessa.

And she's awesome. She manages our blog. And she makes sure that our whole entire team is all prepared and up to date with the latest and greatest news in Empower Network. And by getting to know her on a personal level, it changes your relationship and how she is in the office.

For example, a lot of people will put on a persona, when they're in an environment they don't feel comfortable in, right? So by making them feel comfortable with you, making them open up with you, and really get personal, you end up with somebody who would normally kind of come out of their shell. And they end up being a lot more driven, a lot more focused. Right, Jonathan?

Absolutely. I brought you a bottle of water because I'm just that kind of guy. Thank you. Thank you.

It's a small one, though. So I'm sorry. It's a small one, yeah. That's all we have up here.

So guys, let's talk about the word relationship because really, really, that's the kind of joke we're going to make? OK. Yeah, yeah. All right.

You know, unbelievable. I still love you guys, though. If Dave Wood was here, he'd be laughing hysterically right now. He's probably backstage practicing kung fu, laughing hysterically.

So relationships is an important word because this is something that we see in our support relationships very, very often, that it's either the complete lack of a relationship, which is something that we as marketers always struggle with because we get so skilled at looking at analytics and clicks and conversions that we forget that every single one of those clicks is a person, that there's somebody on the other side of that screen with a mouse or the other side of that phone or that iPad or, you know, I don't know if they're beaming stuff into our heads yet, but I'm sure that's next.

There's a person there with goals and with dreams. It's one of the reasons why when we talk to you about filming your videos, choosing a specific person to talk to so that you're engaging in the way that you would have a cup of coffee, that you would build rapport, that you would make a connection, that in this business, and this is such an overused cliche that I'm going to use anyway because it doesn't make it any less true, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And we have the blessing of being on the cutting edge of online marketing and knowing some amazing strategies for business building.

But those are not nearly as valuable until that relationship has been built, until that bridge of friendship, camaraderie, we are in this together, what's important to you, what are your goals, what are your dreams, why did you do this? It's one of the main reasons why you see me up here, always focused on the why behind everybody in the room. That you haven't seen me come up here yet and say, can anyone give me their 37 point Google plus strategy? Because that's something that you're going to get.

But I do know this, I know if you can master the relationship game, changes everything. I'll let you guys in on a little secret about Dave Wood. Dave Wood's blog has had the worst conversions in the history of the company since the dawn of time. Dave's not a conversion expert.

But what drives Dave's unbelievable results is Dave is about three inches wide and seven miles deep on relationships. Dave can build rapport instantly. Dave can uncover your true drives immediately. And Dave has the ability to bring you into a laughing, fun, jovial conversation before you even know you're laughing.

So I wanted to underscore the power of relationships because it's the first growth driver that, you know, you really recognize, Zach. So let's talk about what we got next. All right, sounds good. Money and opportunity are the other two factors when you have new team members on board.

Zach, what's the difference between money and opportunity? Well, money is the act of making money. And opportunity is more than making money, right? It is your hopes and dreams, what you can achieve, freedom, right?

It is, for instance, for me, yes, I want to make money. You know, who doesn't want to make money, but one of the things that drives me is I want to be able to say to my parents, you guys can retire. You guys can relax, you know, do whatever. I'm going to bring home the bacon for you guys.

And you guys, you know, have an awesome retirement because they provided for me when I was growing up. So that's how I make that distinction for me. And really making that distinction is key because the same things that, you know, you may be the richest person in the world, but you still need another driving factor to truly be successful. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think it's important. I think it's a key distinction because so often in this business particularly, how many of you would recognize that at times we confuse money and opportunity, that we confuse income and the results of that money, and we miss the fact that money really has no meaning intrinsically? I'm sure when I ask any of you if your goal is $10,000 a month, $10,000 a day, whatever it happens to be, it's not because you're dying for somebody to come to your door every morning and deliver a pile of green paper.

It's not because you're wondering what your bank account would look like with that many zeros. It's because that money has meaning. It's because that money creates opportunities for you to do the things you love, treat the people you love differently. And by being able to discern that and have the individuals on your team communicate not only the financial goals that they have as you help them on that path to earning, but also defining the emotional attachment and what that money means to them.

So if you really think about it, the reason why Zach put relationships at the top is because it's the relationship that gives you the ability to identify and clarify the money and identify and clarify the opportunity. How many of you understand that? You tracking with us? Awesome.

Cool. So Zach, when you look at all of the calls and all of the tickets that we take and you've really done a great job of giving them a framework, which by the way, we're going to call this the formula for more. The formula for more. I like that.

Yes, because that's what's going to remind them about money, opportunity, and relationships. The formula for more. Awesome. Yeah.

I could have gone with ROM, but that just doesn't hit quite as well. Yeah. Well, so the reason that we wanted to give you this information is because this is what we see mathematically on our dashboard every day of where people get stuck. So I'm sure Zach can share with you, but I'm guessing it's I haven't heard from my upline.

Yes. I want to connect with someone that can share with me how to do this. Exactly. What's amazing is in the framework Zach's given you, you can very much see the pain points and how many of you have been through some of the new core line of products and the top producer and team builder formula.

Raise your hands. Okay. Yeah. Because I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking, wow, John, all of this sounds like a lot of work in getting to know people. And the answer is, it is if you don't know how to do it. Those products teach you how to do this in a systematic and scalable fashion. That's exactly what they're there for.

Dave goes through how to ensure that you can connect one to many with the same results and same feeling and same impact as one to one. Yeah. That's exactly what you want to pull out of this. So Zach.

Yep. Here we are. Yes. We're in front of the lovely family of affiliates that bring in all of the lovely people that your team gets to meet every day.

Yep. If you only had one thing to leave them with, what would it be? I'll leave you guys with this. I want you guys to picture Empower Network as a road, as a highway, right?

And as Empower Network, we're going to pave that highway. We're going to make it nice, clean, sparkle. Yeah. So as fast as you want, as slow as you want, we're going to have plenty of lanes for you guys so everybody can be successful and everybody can make it to the end, right?

What I want you guys to think about when you have team members is a lot of times team members may want to, you know, they'll be on the highway for a while and then all of a sudden they'll see a detour or something and they'll say, hey, that's a detour and I'm going to start moving towards that way. Well, you need to rope them back in. You need to bring them back on this path of success, bring them back to the basics, really what the system is. And that is one of the reasons why I believe that we simplified our core product for you guys, make it a lot more simpler.

And I just want to leave you guys with that, that we're going to build this highway out. We just need you guys, everybody stay on track and we're going to be ready to roll out for 2015. Rock on. So, you know, guys, sorry, I just got distracted for a moment by a bright orange furry hat with horns.

That just happened. You just never know what you're going to see when you're out here looking at the audience. Yeah. Yeah.

There are a few moments as an executive or a manager or a leader, and I know all of you in here with teams know this, there are a few moments that you get to feel an immense sense of pride matched with an immense sense of gratitude for someone that has truly chosen to master their craft. And that's what we have in Zach and our director of customer success. Zach continues to read voraciously about companies like Zappos, companies that are known around the world for their customer service experience. We now track every single metric as it relates to average ticket close time, average call time, average answer time.

Some of you may have even gotten our feedback loop survey, which lets us know if you're happy or unhappy. And guess what? If you weren't happy, we put you back through the process again. We escalate it to someone more senior.

It really is something that Zach has truly reinvented. And I want to make sure that you guys know that. So if you see him in the hall, give him a big hug and say thank you. So ladies and gentlemen, let's give up, get up, and let's thank Zach for making sure our customers feel valued every single day.

Thanks guys. Love it. Thank you, Mr. Zach.

Appreciate you, man. Thanks, man. All right. One, two, three.

No! One, two, three. No! No!

No! No! No! No!

No! No! No! No!

No! No! No!