How to Retain and Motivate Sales Reps: Money versus Happiness

All sales leaders want to motivate reps to high levels of performance and retain their top earners. What’s the secret to success in these areas?

To find out, you might start by asking sales reps what they want in exchange for their hard work. And one of the first things they’re likely to say is higher commissions and bigger bonuses.

In some ways, this makes sense. Everyone wants a stable income and to be able to provide for themselves and their families. And because salespeople are competitive, they typically appreciate benchmarks to measure how they’re doing, and money is an easy indicator to look at. If they’re making $10k more this year than last year, they feel like a success. If they can finally afford to buy big-ticket items (cars, clothes, gadgets) they feel like everyone else knows they’re a success, too.

It is one thing to be motivated by money, but it’s another to use money as a means to happiness, fulfillment, and meaning. While sales reps don’t always talk about these things, these factors have a big influence on their decision to stay with your company or start looking around for the next opportunity.

Science suggests that, past a certain point, money does not make us any happier. This video from AsapSCIENCE points out that people generally adapt quickly to higher levels of income. Research has shown that, in North America, income beyond $75,000 has no impact on our levels of daily happiness.

If you believe that part of keeping reps motivated means keeping them happy, then maybe it’s time to stop relying so heavily on cash as an incentive.

Reps will always appreciate your help in getting to the next level financially. But if you help them learn to define success and happiness outside of money, that creates a valuable dynamic of trust and support. Those qualities can actually become your competitive advantage — companies that have deeper pockets to pay blowout commissions will be less of a threat to poaching your reps.

In fact, there is evidence to uphold the idea that money is not the greatest long-term strategy for keeping reps around. The fact that money can be fleeting might be something that older and wiser reps learn to understand on their own — Peak Sales Recruiting points out that, over the course of a sales rep’s career, research has shown that higher earners report lower levels of interest in more money.

Money comes and goes, but the value of strong relationships never fails. As a sales leader, what steps are you currently taking to motivate and retain your reps, beyond using money?

5 Important Blog Posts for Sales Leaders

Busy week with your sales team? We thought so. Here are links to five great blog posts you might have missed in the past week, related to topics especially important to sales leaders (including compensation, motivation, social selling, Sales 2.0, and the new B2B buyer cycle). Happy reading!

Blog Post #1: The smart way to motivate, reward, and compensate sales reps (via Sales 2.0 Conference blog)

Have transparent payout information. Salespeople shouldn’t worry if last week’s deal will be in their paycheck or not. If they can see the deal is credited toward their payouts, they can focus on the next one. According to Zuora, it’s a “dispute killer.”

Blog Post #2: Know your B2B buyer cycle (via Sales 2.0 Conference blog)

Here are three basic questions that sales leaders should be able to easily answer about today’s buy cycle:

  1. How well can your sales team build relationships with customers via a variety of channels?
  2. How well does your sales process map to the buy cycle?
  3. How empowered are your reps to have compelling and relevant conversations with qualified prospects online?

Blog Post #3: Saying goodbye to the good old days of selling (via Selling Power blog)

I have always believed that selling is an art. Today, however, no sales leader can afford to ignore science. Sales 2.0 and technology solutions are making the art of selling measurable in actual numbers. And that is going to have a huge effect on the way we lead sales teams in the years to come.

Blog Post #4: Communicating value to prospects (via Heinz Marketing blog)

Many companies include examples of the problem in their sales presentations, and wonder why prospects don’t immediately light up.

Your prospect isn’t going to buy unless the cost of changing is lower than the cost of doing the same. Isolated, anecdotal evidence doesn’t change that value equation. But communicating the scope of the problem very well may.

Blog Post #5: The effect of social on enterprise selling/thoughts on Marc Benioff’s keynote at Dreamforce (via Sales 2.0 Advocate blog)

As your customers, employees and partners become increasingly connected online, this raises some interesting questions, opportunities and risks in regards to trust:

  • Will we have some kind of open and universal access to ratings and reviews for B2B sales and service professionals as we now see on consumer Internet sites for professionals like doctors? Will enterprise products – and the companies that produce them – be subject to a proliferation of eBay or Yelp-like reviews?