Page 64 - DMGT507_SALES AND PROMOTIONS MANAGEMENT

Sales and Promotions Management

Notes
A second implication of declining success rates is that traditional approaches to incentive
management are no longer adequate to the task. Dion Joannou, North America president
of communications giant Nortel Networks, notes that "it's important that a company's
leadership work harder at really understanding people. I spend a fair amount of time
thinking about the things, beyond just compensation, that are going to motivate my sales
team."
Based on the results of Nortel sales team employee satisfaction surveys, for example,
Joannou has divided the motivational dimension of his sales force into two categories.
The first is what he calls "table stakes…the things you need to do just to get people fairly
satisfied. Then, on top of that, another set of factors has to be in place if you intend to
increase their motivation."
According to Joannou, the latter category "may not immediately sound anything like
factors that appear in traditional motivation studies. They include things like sales
enablement and tools, reducing quote cycle times, getting better documentation, and
developing a product that is differentiated and therefore easier to sell. Those are some of
the things that actually motivate salespeople – even more than sales compensation
incentives."
Joannou recalls a recent sales meeting attended by the head of the company's supply chain
management function. That executive listened carefully to the concerns expressed by the
sales force about a number of supply chain issues that were sometimes interfering with
selling to and servicing customers. "One of the most motivational things our salespeople
heard that day was when the supply chain guy stood up and said, 'I understand your
issues, and I'm going to fix them.' In some ways, that was received far better than any type
of sales compensation or special bonus we could have put on the table that day."
Universal Needs

How can one best understand the factors that influence the motivation of a sales force?
One way is to return to the work of Abraham Maslow, a pioneering American psychologist
who introduced, in the 1940s, a hierarchical understanding of basic or innate human
needs.
Generally depicted as a pyramid, the original version of Maslow's hierarchy set forth five
levels of needs. The bottom four levels proceed through basic physiological needs, a need
for safety, for belonging and for esteem. Finally, at the top of the hierarchy sits "self-
actualization," something Maslow called a "growth need"-striving to live up to one's
potential.
Central to the application of Maslow's hierarchy are two principles – first, that people are
motivated to satisfy the lowest level of unmet need, and second, that a satisfied need
cannot serve as a source of motivation. For example, a starving person can be motivated
by the prospect of attaining food; a well-fed one cannot.
Maslow's hierarchy is based on the principle that human beings share a set of universal
needs regardless of their culture and experiences. However, to apply that hierarchy to a
business setting, Maslow's general principles must be expressed in terms more relevant to
a particular workforce. The figure below provides that reinterpretation for a sales force,
and shows four levels of motivational need.

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