Everything you need to know about motivation

What is motivation?

Motivation is a rather misunderstood concept in sales. The amount of interviews I have been in where the sales person says they are money motivated, this is simply not true. As sales people we are told that money is the true motivator, when in actual fact money is a by-product of our motivations.

True motivations comes from within, it comes from your core values and beliefs. Also you can have more than one driver for motivation. I myself have always had a be best motivation and a be perfect motivation. I always strive to be the best in the areas I consider important, and while I understand I will never be perfect I aim to be keep pushing for it.

What types of motivation?

There are many types of drives, but I have come to the realisation that there are two umbrella terms that they all fit under. They are the ‘away from’ and the ‘towards‘ motivations. With the ‘away from’ it means that the drive is focused on away from pain such as losing commission, losing a job, even a status not wanting to lose out. With the ‘towards’ drive you are looking at the go getter attitude, they want to be best, want to earn the most, they want to earn accomplishments.

Have a think to yourself about your motivation, are you ‘away from’ or ‘towards’ driven?

It is not as easy as asking someone what their drive is, and you need to find ways to understand what sort of drive they are. Looking at previous months stats will unveil some of this information, if they are chasing targets from day one you understand that they are ‘towards’ motivated. If you have have sales people who push harder towards the end of the month it shows that they are away from motivated.

Another idea to spot this, is through their language patterns, are they speaking about awards? Wanting to be the best? Are they setting their own goals to get there?

Recruitment

Through using these tools you can start to understand which members of the team suit your style of business and start to make a success model. Then once you have put this together it will start to become clear on what language patterns, motivations and traits to look for when recruiting.

It will take a while to hone in on these skills and traits, and you will get it wrong from time to time.

Conclusion

Understanding what motivates your team is a big skill to learn, and will be very rewarding. There are many ways to understand what drives your team, take some time to understand each individual in your team through quick coaching, one to ones as well as their performance stats. Once you understand the individual, you will help get the best from them.