Practice the Performance Formula

Each person behaves at a certain level today and can behave at a higher level in the future. The performance formula is A × M = P (ability times motivation equals performance). It is your attitude more than your aptitude that determines your attitude.

Ability is a function of aptitude, the necessary characteristics and qualities required for a particular job, plus experience, plus training, plus education.

Aptitude itself is a function of three factors: First, it is a function of natural ability, which can be inborn or can be developed. Second, it is a function of experience. The more relevant experience people have (or have had) in performing the sales or sales management function, the better they are going to be. Third, aptitude is greatly affected by training.

Accelerate Ability

As a sales manager, you cannot change the natural ability or experience of a salesperson. Those are in the past. Those are the factors that come with the package when you hire or field a salesperson.

However, you can change, modify, or accelerate training, education, and personal development. When you start off with the right people in terms of personality and attitude, you can multiply and accelerate their ability to make a contribution to your company with continuous training and education, like an athlete joining a sports team.
Over the years, I have worked with more than 1,000 large companies in sixty-eight countries. It seems that all successful companies have top sales forces. And all top sales forces, including those of IBM, Xerox, Google, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard, spend millions of dollars every year training their people. They have discovered that there is a direct relationship between training and sales success, or success of any other kind.

The Four Factors of Motivation

Motivation is a function of four different factors: leadership, organizational climate, rewards, and individual needs. You can influence each one of these to a greater or lesser degree. The first is leadership style. The most important person on the sales team is the sales manager. Sales managers can affect the motivation and performance of everyone who reports to them. Your leadership ability—your ability to inspire, empower, and encourage people—is a powerful factor in motivation and performance. As the IBM executives discovered, the sales manager is the “pivotal skill” in the organization. Changing the sales manager or improving this manager’s performance can lead to a dramatic and almost immediate increase in sales results.

A Great Place to Work

The second factor in motivation is the organizational climate. Is your company a great place to work? Are people happy, positive, and cheerful? Do people get along well with each other and look forward to coming to work? Do they feel that they can express themselves and their concerns openly and honestly to their boss?
There is a simple way to determine if you have created a great place to work. It is called the “laugh test.” Because laughter occurs spontaneously and unplanned, it is always a true test of the quality of the relationships among any group of people.
In a good company, people laugh a lot. They tell a lot of jokes and joke around with each other. They are always smiling and cheerful. They are obviously happy to be at their place of work. And the more people laugh at work, the more confident and positive they feel, and the more they will sell.

The Reward Structure

The third factor affecting attitude is the reward structure. As Khrushchev said, “Call it what you will, but people are motivated by incentives.”
It turns out that salespeople have two major motivators: money and status. They are motivated by earning more money and the potential to earn more money. This drives the most ambitious and highest-performing salespeople more than any other single factor.
They are also motivated by status, by being made to feel important in the company. But never make the mistake of thinking that you can replace giving people more money with status rewards, like trophies and plaques.

Money as the Motivator

Many top executives in business have never been in sales. They often think that salespeople are not or should not be motivated by money. They think that salespeople should be motivated by the love of their work or by some feeling of company loyalty. These executives are almost invariably wrong.
During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, the president of a fast-growing Silicon Valley firm, who had never been in sales, announced that effective immediately, all salespeople would be paid exactly the same, regardless of their sales results. He felt that competition among the salespeople to make more sales was “unseemly.” Salespeople should get their motivation from some source other than money. This announcement was made in the national press.
What do you think happened? Within six months, all of the firm’s top salespeople had left and joined competitive companies that offered them premium rewards for excellent sales results. The only people who stayed were the average or mediocre salespeople who were quite content to have a guaranteed salary. Six months later, the company went broke. The competition ate it alive. To this day, the company can’t understand why sales dropped 80 percent in less than a year and all of its investors lost everything.

What People Need

The fourth factor in motivation is the need structure of each individual. Different people at different stages of their sales careers have different needs if they are to perform at their best.
New salespeople need clear structure and supervision. They need to be told exactly what to do and when to do it, and then they need to be supervised carefully to make sure that they do their job, that they do it well, and that they do it on time.

Senior salespeople have different needs. They need largely to be left alone. They want to have a friendly camaraderie with their sales manager and then have the sales manager simply get out of their way so that they can go out and bring in the sales. They very much resent being overcontrolled or having their freedom limited or curtailed for any reason.

Your job as a sales manager is to find out and understand the needs of each salesperson. Some need more guidance. They need to talk to their sales manager on a regular basis. They need regular feedback. They need skills coaching and hand-holding. Others neither need nor want any of these things. They just want to go out and make sales.
Keep asking, “What do my salespeople need to be motivated? What does this particular salesperson need to perform at his/her best?”

In most cases, the answer is simple. They need clear sales goals and objectives; clear, written, and measurable standards of performance and deadlines; sales success experiences; and rewards based on performance. They need praise and encouragement and recognition for a job well done. If you can give them these things, they will go out and make sales in any market.

ACTION EXERCISES

1. Make a list of your salespeople, and next to each name, write one or two specific needs that each individual might have to be more productive.
2. Treat all of your salespeople as if they have the potential to be superstars if you can just create the proper environment in which they can perform at their best.