Turnover that depends on one person should be measured before that person leaves

29 October 2026, 07:58

In many companies part of the turnover does not belong to the business but to the relationship between a customer and whoever looks after it: the salesperson, the agent or the technician it has dealt with for years. As long as that relationship lasts, the dependence appears in no accounting document; when the person who held it leaves, it shows itself all at once. On 28 October the leadership of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a New York law firm with around 1,200 lawyers, told its partners that it intended to wind the firm down in an orderly way, after a series of partner departures to rival firms that they had failed to stop.

Customers follow the person who knows them, even before the brand

In professional firms the phenomenon is plain to see: when the partner who wins the work moves to another firm, some of their clients go with them. In recent years the large American firms have competed with ever higher pay for the professionals who bring in the most work, and those that lose them become fragile.

In manufacturing and trading companies the same mechanism is less visible, and its strength depends on how easy it is to change supplier. The purchasing manager of a customer company has dealt with the same salesperson for years, who knows their volumes, their urgent needs and the history of the terms obtained, and is often the only one who knows why that customer gets a discount or a delivery time different from the others. When the salesperson moves to a competitor, the customer follows above all if what it buys can be found unchanged elsewhere: a catalogue component can be bought from anyone who offers it at a similar price, whereas a part made to drawing and already tested on the customer's machines is not changed out of friendship. The risk grows with sales agents, because they work on their own account, often represent several companies and have built the relationships with the clientele in their area themselves.

Each salesperson's and agent's share is already in the management software

To obtain it, all that is needed is for the customer master record to show the agent or salesperson in charge: from then on the management software assigns to each of them the sales of their customers, and the sales-by-agent report, the same one used to calculate commissions, shows what part of the turnover of the last twelve months passes through each one. Alongside this figure comes a piece of information that no software holds, namely how many people in the company know the contact person at each major customer personally and understand how the terms that customer enjoys came about. If only one salesperson knows a customer's contact person, the sales to that customer depend on that salesperson rather than on the business.

The most common mistake is to look only at how much each customer weighs on the total. Many medium-sized buyers, each with a small share, look like a well-spread portfolio; but if they all deal with the same salesperson, they can move to the competitor all at once, as if they were a single customer as large as their sum.

The law limits competition from those who leave, it does not hold on to customers

While the employment relationship lasts, Article 2105 of the Italian Civil Code forbids the employee to do business in competition with the employer. After it ends, the ban exists only if the parties have signed a non-compete agreement, the agreement by which the worker undertakes not to work for competitors for a certain period. Article 2125 of the Civil Code allows it if it is in writing, if it provides for payment to the worker and if the restriction has precise limits of subject matter, time and place; it cannot last more than five years for executives and three for everyone else. For agents, Article 1751-bis of the same code applies: the agreement must be in writing, covers the area, the customers and the type of products of the contract, lasts no more than two years after the contract ends and entitles the agent to an indemnity.

The agreement therefore has a price, and it keeps the one who leaves away from competitors, not the one who buys, who remains free to choose another supplier. The soundest defence is organisational and serves to tie the customer to the business, not only to one person: the sales manager meets the main customers together with the salesperson or the agent a few times a year; the internal sales office, which takes the orders and answers the phone, becomes a second point of contact for the customer; and alongside the terms, which the management software already holds because without them not even an invoice could be issued, the company records why they were granted, the commitments made, the visits and the offers. These activities cost working hours, to be measured against the share of sales they protect.

In the controlling of a company that sells through salespeople and agents, turnover per person should be read every year alongside turnover per customer: together they show how much of the sales would stay with the business the day after a departure.

This article was prompted by a news item published in the Financial Times on 28 October 2026.