Members of Carew International's executive team blog about the challenges and opportunities relative to today's business reality.

I’ll bet you think this piece is about sales contests, incentive plans, and other money driven levers to motivate your sales team, right? Wrong!  In fact, I am going in the opposite direction. I think financial incentives are VERY critical components to attracting and retaining top sales talent, but are far less effective as motivators once they work for you.  While monetary rewards can be quite helpful in keeping your team from becoming LESS motivated, they will generally do little to motivate them further.

It is my contention that there is little you can do to motivate your sales team en masse beyond optimizing the environment. People are in charge of motivating themselves. If you don’t believe me, try hiring a motivational speaker and see what kind of lasting impact that has on the performance of the sales team. People must choose to motivate themselves and each person has their own reasons for doing so. The best you can do as a manager is to create the optimal environment where your sales professionals can best motivate and empower themselves.

Stopping short of a trip down Brain Street, people are motivated internally by one of two core motivators--gaining pleasure or avoiding pain. Those root motivators are at the core of all the individual reasons your employees may choose to motivate themselves. In all the research I have read, money seldom ranks higher than fourth or fifth on the list of the top ten things that motivate employees. The key to optimizing motivation is to understand the INDIVIDUAL top ten list of each of your sales professionals. While sales people generally rank compensation higher than other categories of employees it is still seldom number one on the list.

Try this exercise with your sales team. On one side of a page, write down the top five things that the company expects from each sales professional. This should be easy because the list doesn’t change from one rep to another on the company side of the page. On the other side of the page, have each sales professional write down their list of the top five things that motivates them at work. Once you have this list, it will become much easier to create the optimal motivational environment for each sales professional by being mindful of the items on their side of the list and flexing your approach accordingly.

For example, if John Doe says becoming a manager is the most motivating thing for him, respect is number two, and money doesn’t check in until number four.  How much do you think the traditional sales contest is going to motivate John? It might motivate him more if you tied it to gaining the fast track to management by winning the sales contest; but John would probably be much more motivated by things such as mentoring and coaching new reps.

While working as the Head Coach for the Dallas Cowboys Jimmie Johnson had the philosophy that he would treat everyone consistently, and that would be differently based upon what each individual required. Jimmie has a couple of Super Bowl rings- - so maybe he was on to something.