Motivation Matters
Having great salespeople is a matter of finding the right buttons for each individual.

By Troy Harrison


Managers in companies of all sizes must know how to motivate their salespeople. But often, they’re not sure how to do it.

Too many people think there is only one answer: money. They’re wrong. In fact, if you have a sales staff of five people, you’d likely have five different answers as to what motivates them. That’s because salespeople are individuals, and they have different wants and needs. To motivate salespeople properly, you have to understand and take advantage of their key internal and external motivators.

Internal Motivators
Internal motivators are those that are generated from within the salesperson⎯the reasons that person chose selling as a career. Although you cannot control or instill these things in your people, you must use them as best you can. The most common internal motivators are:

•    Money—Sales is seen (correctly) as a path to a very financially rewarding career. For those who take a professional, long-term approach, it is rewarding indeed. A recent survey showed that roughly 5 percent of America’s self-made millionaires were salespeople who had worked for someone else for their entire careers! Unfortunately, this motivation leads many to sales in hopes of a quick buck, invariably resulting in disappointed salespeople and customers.  

•    Freedom—Selling can give one a degree of professional freedom unmatched by any other discipline in business. It is rare for professional salespeople to punch a time clock.

•    Working With People—For those who love working with people, sales can be an ideal career. Because one’s success in sales is, in part, driven by the number of contacts one makes, this can be a powerful motivator.

•    Competitiveness—For those driven to compete, sales may be a great career choice. Few careers offer as much opportunity to compete, both internally and externally, as sales.

•    Creativity—For the right person, creativity is the core of sales excellence. Someone who can “create” a solution to customer needs and demands on the spot can be a successful salesperson.

•    Security—Although in many cases selling is not the most “secure” of career choices, it does provide a good living; and, the desire for financial security for one’s family can be a powerful motivator toward a selling career.

•    Desire to Help People and Form Relationships—This is the best selling motivator of all. When salespeople begin with a desire to help people and form lasting relationships, they will perform activities that will motivate their customers to buy from them. This will achieve most, if not all, of the other motivating factors.

While salespeople will, from time to time, have different key internal motivators than the ones listed, these will be the most common. Your job in managing your sales staff is to get to know them as individuals, and know them well enough to understand what motivates each one. Once you know that, you can use that motivation to help them achieve excellence. But internal motivators are not the only way to light a fire under salespeople.

External Motivators
External motivators are typically aspects of the job that either appeal to the individual salesperson (thus motivating them to achieve more) or detract from the appeal (thus de-motivating them). These are things that you, as the business owner or manager, can control.

•    Activity Type—Not all selling is the same. Some salespeople are “high activity” salespeople. This means they spend a lot of time making a high quantity of calls to find prospects who are able and ready to purchase in a short time frame. There are also “low activity” salespeople, who work with a smaller number of prospects or customers to build long-term relationships. Some sales jobs are a mix of the two, and it’s important to match your selling environment with the types of salespeople that you have. Put a high-activity salesperson into a low-activity job, and they will fail to build the necessary relationships. Conversely, a low-activity salesperson will fail to feed enough prospects into their sales funnel.

•    Support—This one is simple. Make it easy for your salespeople to sell and bring business on board, and they’ll do it. Make it tough (by allowing service or production people to slow the process unnecessarily), and salespeople won’t want to go through the hassle. Eventually, they’ll leave. Take your sales team’s pulse from time to time, and eliminate unnecessary roadblocks.

•    Work Environment—Salespeople like to work in a pleasant environment. That seems obvious, but business owners have a hard time with it. When salespeople feel that they are treated unfairly, or the work environment is hostile, they typically don’t do as well, nor do they stay as long. You can, of course, take the pleasant environment to extremes, but in this case it’s best to base your actions on the Golden Rule: Treat your salespeople with the respect that you would like to receive, and you’ll do fine.

•    Money—Yes, money can be both an internal and external motivator. You have the ability to set compensation plans that are rewarding and fair, plans that overpay for a given level of achievement (which may be necessary, depending on how you handle the other external motivators), or which underpay. The reason money is here twice is simple: Have a hostile work environment, too many roadblocks, or inappropriate activity patterns, and you’ll have to pay your people boatloads of money to keep them. Conversely, a good work environment can make up for a slightly lower pay plan.

Motivating salespeople isn’t a black art; they’re human beings and individuals, just like you are. Use the above internal and external motivators to your advantage, and you’ll have a happy, stable and successful sales team.

Troy Harrison is a sales trainer and the owner of SalesForce Solutions, a Kansas City-based sales training, consulting, recruiting and assessment company. You can get more information about SalesForce Solutions and subscribe to the free “HotSheet” weekly e-newsletter by visiting www.salesforcesolutions.net or calling (913) 645-3603.