Incentives ... And Other Impediments To Sales Success

If you wanted me to ride a motorbike and I did too, but I had no idea how to ride one, would you organise training for me or an incentive?

This is a silly question, of course, however in business incentives are used over and above motivation and training to a frightening extent.

The greatest incentive for sales people should be their salaries, not commissions and other rewards. Salaries are paid to sales people for the consistent achievement of company and customer objectives. The only company objective most sales people know of is ‘budget’, and they know little or nothing about true customer objectives. Additionally, the majority of sales people achieve sales budgets only ‘now and then’, and therefore their incentive earnings are low or non-existent. I should point out that I am not against incentives. As a former sales and marketing director for a large multi-national, I used commissions and incentives to invite sales people to think and operate at rarefied levels. However, my priority was to ensure that our sales team knew how to behave in a professional and effective manner.

The challenge for organisations is to provide sales people with ‘behavioural budgets’ and not just $ sales budgets. This raises a question in two parts: what are the company’s and the customers’ behavioural needs of your sales people?

Most organisations do not set standards of behaviour for their sales people, and job descriptions do nothing to address this issue. And organisations do not discuss with customers what kind of sales behaviour they need to achieve mutual progress. Occasional focus groups will not throw sufficient light on this matter.

Asking sales people to compete for goods and services that customers know they want is not high level sales behaviour. High level sales behaviour – beyond competing successfully for what is ‘wanted’ - is helping customers to see key problems and opportunities they know little about, and then leading them to buy and implement the best possible solutions.

Obviously, everyone seems to know about this challenge, after all it is featured as a goal on most vision statements. Regrettably, while it might be ‘known’ it is not being put into practice. The reason for this is that management short-circuits the motivation and training issues with weak offerings like ‘incentives’. But incentives is only one of the many success substitutes used in business; here are some others:

A change of title - Apparently, if a sales person is called a Business Development Manager (BDM) or a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), this improves their behaviour and performance. The opposite happens: the title suggests improvement but if the service remains the same the disappointment for customers will be greater!
Product knowledge training - Customers are only interested in their own products, not ours, and so their question is ‘How can your product help my product to succeed?’ Most sales people are not provided with this special knowledge.
Sales aids created by marketing or the ad agency - These are usually materials that focus on products, which send negative signals to customers. Consultation tools are critical to sales people and in my experience agencies have little or no experience in this area.
Annual sales training course - Most sales training is predicated on learning tedious, hackneyed ‘techniques’. The usual course involves drivel like ‘How to handle objections’, whereas the great need of sales people is ‘How to defend beliefs’. Naturally then, the sales people who are forced to handle the most objections are those with the least beliefs.
A sales conference - This kind of event often becomes a pig-out with no residual value; it costs a fortune and is the equivalent of visiting a gym once each year.

Such is the lot of sales people, and it has been this way for years. I have yet to see seminars advertising ‘positive thinking for doctors’, or ‘goal setting for engineers’; only sales people have to tolerate this endless diet of nonsense. Doctors, engineers, architects and other professionals are driven by a continuous obligation to offer valuable knowledge to those they serve.

To ensure sales people operate as professionals, organisations need to address these issues:

Ensure that your ‘service promise’ to the market at large is consistently updated, so that what your sales force sells is a distinctive, valuable and highly attractive offering
Consistently sell the team on the needs of the business and on the needs of the customers (not just the wants), and these needs should be compatible and complimentary to the needs of the sales team
Set high level behavioural standards, and offer ‘dietary’ training and professional consultation tools to enable the team to practise the standards set
Measure the effectiveness of sales people by their behaviour, as well as by their results, through organised customer feedback
Management must set an example of professional behaviour, inside and outside the company

Incentives might make people ‘go’ but they do not make people grow. Only high quality motivation, knowledge, strategies and tools can achieve that goal. Finally, sales people must grow professionally at a greater rate than their budgets, otherwise service, profits and the sales team are at serious risk.

John Lees is a speaker, trainer and consultant specialising in sales and marketing, and is the author of 7 business books. Contact John Lees direct on 02 9680 7588; e-mail is: info@johnlees.com.au; Web site: www.johnlees.com.au
First published: 28 February 2003.
Last updated: 26 March 2003.