5 minute read
Puzzling out Motivation
When you talk about being a salesperson, people often assume that the biggest motivator, perhaps the only reason for doing the job, is commission. The more you reward someone for making a sale, the more sales they’ll make, the happier everyone will be – or so the thinking goes.
The problem is that this is simply not the case, a view backed up by lots of research papers. One from the London School of Economics analysed 51 studies and found that fnancial incentives actually reduce motivation and have a negative impact on performance.
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Instead, you need to give people what the best-selling business writer Dan Pink outlines in his Ted Talk, The Puzzle of Motivation, namely, autonomy, mastery and purpose. They have the urge to direct their own lives, the desire to get better at something that matters, and a yearning to do something larger than themselves.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but at Redgate Software we’ve found that it’s the ideal building block for a selling approach that is professional, ethical and good for the business. Commission
does come into the picture, but it lies further down the career route, at the point when the autonomy, mastery and purpose that Dan Pink talks about have already become second nature. IT STARTS WITH THE RIGHT PEOPLE Instead of recruiting experienced salespeople, we prefer to hire at entry level and then develop people and promote them within the company. We deliberately look for people with little or no sales experience and run assessment days based on their ability to talk to people, work in a group, and communicate well.
If they’re hired, we then train them from the ground up to work initially in our inside sales team. There, their task is to take calls from customers who want to buy our software. The deals are typically worth less than £5,000 and it’s a relatively straightforward sales process, but there’s a lot of technical knowledge for these fairly recent recruits to get up to speed with.
We also have them interacting with other teams in the business, such as our people in software development and marketing, so that they realise it’s not just a one-person sale. We educate them on the customer coming frst and get them in front of some customers as soon as possible, so they build their confdence and really understand who they’re selling to.
It’s enforced from the top down too. Our CEO, Simon Galbraith, stresses to new hires that we’ve built a great brand, our customers love us for a reason, and that’s how we’ve become successful. We don’t sell “shelfware”, and our sales policy is the same in every instance: Is it the right thing to do for the customer? Do they need what we’re selling them, and will it make them come back to us for more when they’ve grown their business? Is it the right thing to do for Redgate? For example, if it’s a sale that would involve a lot of extra work from the software development team to customise the tools in some way, or need additional support above and beyond the capacity we have at Redgate, we’ll pass up the opportunity, whatever its size.
This is important, because it makes the salespeople realise from day one that before the topic of commission even comes into the conversation, we have to be sure we’re doing the right thing for our customers and our business. IT CONTINUES WITH A CLEAR CAREER PATH We spend a lot of money developing our new hires so that they can get from an entry-level inside sales position all the way through to an enterprise account executive role very quickly. In fact, we’re proud that all our current enterprise
CASSI ROPER is sales director at Redgate Software, heading up the EMEA and APAC regions. In 2018, she received the Sales Director of the Year award at the British Excellence in Sales Management Awards (BESMA). Having worked in software sales for over 15 years, she has experience across all aspects of the sales process, with a focus on team leadership and the accountsbased sales approach. She particularly enjoys the challenges of building sales teams in new territories and bringing stakeholders across the company together to land complex technical sales. Contact her at cassi.roper@red-gate.com
account executives started in a junior role.
I’m a frm believer that anybody we hire should have the ability to move on to a senior role and it’s just about how quickly we can develop them, and how much they care about their own development, in order to achieve that. We stress to them that their future isn’t solely driven by a manager wanting to promote them – their progress is also largely driven by them wanting to get developed.
I’ve also found that knowledge plays a major part in driving really intelligent people, and our best sales representatives want to learn more about what they’re selling. They look for domain knowledge, fnd out what’s changing in the industry, and go to events and seminars.
Remember the autonomy, mastery and purpose that Dan Pink talked about it? After a surprisingly short time in the inside sales team, that’s what increasingly drives our people. They have a clear career path ahead of them, they’re being given the tools to be better at what they do, and they’ve been shown they’re working for a company that does the right thing. IT RESULTS IN PEOPLE BEING WELL REWARDED Once they’ve learned about Redgate tools, been shown the way we sell them, and soaked up the Redgate culture, our inside sales representatives are ready to take on a more senior sales development role. This is where the commission kicks in because it’s about outbound selling, which is a lot harder, involving targeting and messaging people who may not have heard of Redgate before or, if they have, they last looked at our tools many years ago.
The route is then clear to get promoted further, right up to enterprise account executive, which involves face-to-face visits, negotiating seven-fgure deals and working across the rest of the business in order to make sure that customers are getting the help they need to use our tools.
But at each stage, while commission increases along with responsibilities, the foundation of doing the right thing for the customer and the right thing for Redgate always comes frst.
I do believe you should ofer commission to a sales team to motivate and retain your best talent. But I don’t believe it’s the only thing you can use, and I certainly don’t believe you need it for entry-level roles. Commission is part of the story, but nowhere near the whole story.
