How do you motivate your sales teams?

The majority of sales managers, VPs, and CROs that I talk to wish they had more highly motivated salespeople who were ‘hungry’. (This comes up a lot when we talk about millennials).

"We've given them every answer to every question, they just need to do it!

I've spent time a lot of money on tools and time on training, but it just doesn't seem to stick or takes too long.

The few that are hungry get it, so how do we motivate the hungry ones to keep going, and the rest to get going?"

My answer is typically a version of:

"You don't. They have to. But you can help them uncover it. Here's how."

Tapping into what motivates your sales teams to continuously improve and set goals that are bigger than their quotas is like building a house in the country. The first thing you have to do before you build anything is find and drill for water. You can’t put the water where you want it. But you can find it, tap into it, and direct it.

And if there is no water to be found, you can't build there.

What are your sales team’s motivational drivers?

So where is the water, and how do you find it? Is there some type of dowsing rod that you can wave that will magically show you where to tap the well of motivation in your sales team? Not quite, but you can objectively test for it and scientifically tap into it.

Recent data from Objective Management Group shows that 47% of salespeople are intrinsically motivated. For example, they may want to be the master of their craft, be part of something bigger, or maybe prove something to someone else or themselves.

In addition to the OMG data, a meta-analysis published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior analyzed 120 years of research and synthesized the findings from 92 quantitative studies. They reported that intrinsic motivation is a stronger predictor of job performance than extrinsic motivation. The more people focus on money, the less they focus on satisfying their curiosity, learning new skills, or having fun, and those are the very things that make people perform best.

What they found is that the association between salary and job satisfaction is very weak. The results show that there is less than 2% overlap between pay and job satisfaction levels. These findings align with what we have seen with the sales teams who have come to us for 1-1 training and coaching- they are primarily intrinsically motivated.

Which correlates to the OMG data that only 25% of salespeople are extrinsically motivated. Their drive is around rewards, money, materialistic accomplishments. Are you structuring your sales culture and incentives around money hoping to motivate salespeople, but not getting anywhere? Are you positive that money is their primary motivator?

You might hypothesize that if only 25% of salespeople are extrinsically motivated, then they must be the top 10% of salespeople right? I wondered that too. I was wrong. When you look at how the top 10% are motivated, 81% are primarily intrinsically driven.

OMG recently published data for those who are altruistically motivated and report that 13% of salespeople fall into this motivation style. They seek to serve others, help them anyway they can, they are completely unselfish and focused on the welfare of others. Altruistic motivation is what you might call a 'servant mindset'. More factors are needed to determine how well this motivational style works in sales. It could be that without their own agenda, they won’t be able to move a decision forward. It could also be that the drive to solve a problem for someone, or make the world a better place, means that they will stop at nothing to do so.

Then there are the 15% who are a blended balance of all three styles. 14% of top salespeople are motivated by all three ways.

It’s important to understand that there is no right or wrong way to be motivated, they are just different. Not many are 100% of any one style, but one may be more dominant than others. 

However you and your team are motivated, it doesn’t make goal setting any less important. Understanding the motivational style of your team as a whole and each individual and tapping into that well is key to helping them through the process of setting and reaching goals (that are bigger than the quota!).

And therein lies the problem. According to OMG, only 51% of sales candidates have personally meaningful written goals, 41% have a plan, and 47% have a system to track their progress (CRM doesn't count!).

Interestingly, 83% of sales candidates say their goals are personally meaningful. But I have to wonder -how true that is given the other data on how many actually have a plan and way to track their personal progress?

Why do we put off setting goals?

We’ve all had a case of procrastination. For most people goal setting doesn't sound like fun. According to Timothy Pychyl, Ph.D, an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University, there are several factors that influence goal setting, motivation, and procrastination.

There is a real cost in time and resources to make a goal and commit to reaching it. It’s work, and they know it. Maybe what they say they want, the goal, isn’t worth all that? Sometimes the things we think we want, we really don’t.

Then there is the fear of failure. What if we tell others about our big and audacious goals and we don’t reach them? Bad enough to fail, even worse to do so openly…

The type of mindset and beliefs your team has will have a direct impact on their motivation and the goals they set for themselves. Ideally a sales leader would objectively assess new hire candidates for motivational style and beliefs as well as ask questions about their goals during the hiring process.

How can you help your sales teams set motivating goals?

Gail Matthews at the Dominican University did a study of 149 participants who were randomly placed into 5 groups and asked to rate their goals based on “Difficulty, Importance, the extent to which they had the Skills & Resources to accomplish the goal, their Commitment and Motivation to the goal, whether or not they had Pursued this goal before and if so their Prior Success.”

Each group was asked to do their goal setting differently.

Group 1- needed to only think about their goals.

Group 2- needed to think about and write their goals.

Group 3- needed to think about, write, and create action commitments.

Group 4- needed to think about, write, create action commitments, and share it with a supportive person.

Group 5- needed to think about, write, create action commitments, share it with a supportive person, and make weekly reports to that person.

Would you be surprised if I told you that those in group 5 accomplished significantly more than any other group? Or that groups 2-5 did significantly better than those in group 1?

How could you incorporate these findings into your sales development program? Make goal setting (as described above) part of the interview and on-boarding process. Do it regularly with your teams. Help your sales managers align your salesperson’s ‘why’ with your company’s and the issue of driven and motivated salespeople won’t be a complaint.

For more on the science of sales development, including how beliefs and mindsets impact sales behaviors and what to do about them, listen to the on-demand session "Mindset Matters" on the Sales Experts Channel.

This post originally appeared on the Unbound Growth blog and has been updated for LinkedIn.