Field sales burnout: spotting it before you lose the rep
Field reps don't quit loudly. They quit quietly, over a long drive home, about three months before you notice.
The hardest part of managing a field team is that you don't see them every day. So the early warning signs of burnout are subtle, and by the time they're obvious, the rep has already emotionally left.
The quiet signs
Visits per week trend down slowly — not sharply. Voice memos get shorter and more generic. Follow-ups stop including the small personal touches that were there last quarter. The rep is still working. They're just working from a narrower emotional bandwidth.
None of these look bad in a dashboard. They look like a rep who's "holding steady." Holding steady is a yellow flag in a job that should be growing.
The root cause isn't hours
Field reps choose a job that involves long drives and weird hours. They don't typically burn out from hours. They burn out from three things:
One: after-hours paperwork. The CRM tax — all the updating they do at 9 PM after their family is asleep.
Two: unfair territory. Watching another rep with a better zip code make double while they grind mile after mile for scraps.
Three: being measured on things they can't control. Pipeline coverage when marketing isn't feeding leads. Close rate when product can't ship on time.
The intervention
Ride with them. Not to coach. Not to check. Just to ride. Two days, in their truck, on their route. You'll learn more about whether they're okay than any dashboard will tell you.
Then fix the thing you find. One of the three. The rep will stay for another year.