Sales people and reinforcement—what drives your top dogs?

Getting people to do their best work, even in trying times, is a sales manager’s most pressing challenge.  A motivated sales force means better corporate performance. No one doubts that. But in today’s tough selling environment it can mean the difference between being the market’s alpha dog and fighting over scraps with the rest of the pack.

A recent article published in the Harvard Business Review (Employee Motivation: A Powerful New Model, August 2008) suggests that people are motivated by 4 basic emotional desires; to acquire, to bond, to comprehend and to defend.

Just about all sales compensation plans do a pretty good job exploiting the desire to acquire and defend. Comp plans recognize and reward a sale person for obtaining new business with bonuses and rewards—stuff and status. And comp plans legitimize the spoils by reinforcing that success is a shared outcome.

Sales people are also motivated to defend what is theirs. Not material gains as much as reputation and standing. Again most comp plans do a very good job at leveraging the competitive nature of sales people by constantly testing their status as a success and challenging them to reaffirm their standing within the pack.

But what about the desire to bond and comprehend? According to the article, we are all motivated by our desire to understand the world around us. Not only the desire to make sense of it all, but to make a meaningful contribution. Sales people in particular have an inherent desire to aid in customers’ success. How does your cash plan address that? Does it at all?

This void is all part of the intrinsic compensation system that sales managers should leverage more.   The sales manager should think of him/herself as an untapped link in the compensation promise. Sales managers can use recognition to encourage progress made by their reps in targeting, planning, messaging, engaging, presenting and negotiating in ways that build a higher level of perceived value for the customer. Right here is the perfect place to address this yearning for “compensation”.