The Psychology Behind Successful Sales Team Motivation

Motivation and retention of employees are two of the biggest challenges facing Sales Managers today. The rapidly-changing workplace of today mandates that employees stay motivated. Sales forces that stay motivated help businesses survive due to increased overall productivity. Motivation is the basis for survival for an organization, yet it is usually ignored as a business topic. There is no clear-cut and well-defined approach to tackling the challenge of employee motivation. Most companies usually ignore it unless a problem crops up.

There are various factors that motivate employees and they keep changing and entering into new stages of fulfillment. As employees' income increases, money becomes less of a motivator. Similarly as employees get older, interesting work becomes more of a motivator.

Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist who was a pioneer in humanistic counseling methods and coined the term 'trans-personal psychology'. Maslow believed that the need to develop a person's basic potential can take precedence over other motivators which may appear to be more evident.

Maslow Pioneered a model commonly known as 'Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs', which sheds much light on what motivates people to seek out certain positions and therefore helps sales Resource professionals to determine how best to use these basic building blocks which encompass human nature. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a five tier model which explains human needs in the order in which they take precedence.

The first tier which is defined as physiological needs, relates to the need for survival, food, water and shelter, and is the most prominent need to shape man's motivation. Maslow believes people attempt to satisfy these needs in a specific order. A person will strive to meet physiological needs before addressing needs for safety, love, and so forth.

Maslow looks at his first four needs in his hierarchy as deficiency needs. Deficiency needs stop motivating once they are satisfied. However, the final need being self actualization is a need that drives our behavior throughout our entire life. If a business continually gives employees the opportunity to meet this high level need the company should expect its employees to be well motivated.

There are two popular schools of thoughts behind the concept of self actualization. According to one school, we are always in pursuit of achieving self-actualization and the other school propounds that we do achieve the temporary self actualization but the moment we accomplish that we set another goal and start putting the effort to actualize that goal. Those who strive to realize their potential are looking for such opportunity and position from where their idea can take a concrete shape and blossom to prosper.

Daiv Russell is a management and marketing consultant with Envision Web Marketing. Read more Articles about Small Business Management, learn about Maslow and Maslows hierarchy of needs.

Article Source: http://www.thearticleinsiders.com