Inspire Peak Performance in Your Sales Team

Selling is a skill that requires fortitude, creativity, and daily persistence. Daniel Pink, author of
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, encourages sales managers to focus on the three key elements of intrinsic motivation:

1. Autonomy: The desire to direct our own lives and control our work flow, how we allocate our time, and precisely how we plan to achieve our goals.
2. Mastery: The desire to get better and better at something that matters. Whether you’re a great artist, athlete, software developer, or sales professional, the inner drive to constantly improve is strong.
3. Purpose: The fundamental impulse to want to be a part of a larger cause, an undertaking that outstrips our individual contributions.

Notice that financial compensation appears nowhere on the list. The best way to tap into intrinsic motivation, says Pink, is to take the issue of money off the table and let people focus on the work. “The more prominent salary, perks, and benefits are in someone’s work life,” Pink says, “the more they can inhibit creativity and unravel performance.”

How can sales organizations adopt a new approach to compensation and motivation that doesn’t involve dangling financial carrots in front of the sales force? Pink suggests making performance metrics wide ranging, relevant, and hard to game. If you’re a sales rep and your pay depends largely on hitting your sales goal for the quarter, that’s what you’ll focus on doing. But what if your pay depended on a variety of factors, including next quarter’s sales, current year’s sales, margins, customer satisfaction, new product idea generation, and peer evaluation? In that case, you’d probably widen your focus to include not only selling this quarter, but also such issues as profitability, customer satisfaction, and teamwork – the essence of good work. The point, Pink says, is that varied metrics are harder to finagle and less likely to encourage corner cutting.

“Some people will inevitably find a way to game even the most carefully calibrated system,” Pink admits. “But using a variety of measures that reflect the totality of great work can transform often counterproductive ‘if/then’ rewards into less combustible ‘now that’ rewards.”