How to motivate sales employees

Motivation is a word derived from the word “motive” which means needs, desire, wants, or drives within the individuals. Motivation is a process that helps in stimulating people to accomplish goals.

Quoting Author Jeff Nevid’s definition, "The term motivation refers to factors that activate, direct, and sustain goal-directed behavior. Motives are the 'whys' of behaviour – the needs or wants that drive behavior and explain what we do. We don't actually observe a motive; rather, we infer that one exists based on the behavior we observe."

In the context of work, there are certain psychological factors which could be:

• Desire for money
• Success
• Recognition
• Job-Satisfaction
• Team Work

Which makes it an important function of the company’s management to create willingness amongst employees to perform to their best. Hence, the role of the leader is to arouse interest in the performance of employees in their jobs.

Going by individual approach, not all of us are same. It is important to categorise employees and then try to motivate them. Touching upon the theory of motivation, employees can be categorised in either being motivated with stimuli coming from within (“Intrinsic”) or from outside (“Extrinsic”).

When we think of dales employees, the adjectives which get associated are enthusiastic, cheerful, persuasive and talkative. They think of targets, quotas, conversion, revenues…

In the intrinsic part, going by personal experience at work & with friends, some desires which keeps us motivated could be:

• Acceptance – team, manager, management accepting your views, decisions etc.,
• Curiosity – the itch to know it all
• Honor – respect for rules set & be ethical
• Independence – sense of doing things alone & uniquely
• Order – organised feeling
• Power – to be influential
• Social Status – to feel important

1. Add responsibilities to feel inspired
2. Recognise them as a valuable resource : Employee Spotlight newsletters
3. Make them feel accomplished
4. Thank you emails to make them desired to be remembered as a thought leader in the industry space