How do you motivate your salespeople? Striking the right balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation can transform resilience, creativity, and long-term success. Reuben explores the research, insights, and strategies to fuel healthy, high-performing salespeople.

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation

When driving for high performance in any work or team environment, common wisdom is to focus on intrinsic motivation, typically creates more durable, self-sustaining effort than purely external rewards as its driven by:

• autonomy
• mastery
• purpose

But it gets more interesting when considering sales: traditionally, both the individuals and the typical culture/structures in place lean towards extrinsic motivation, which features:

• Bonuses
• Commission
• Reaching targets

Whilst KPIs and commission may get you out of bed in the morning — or keep you in the office late — enjoying what you do and being driven to grow and master your craft may be what drives resilience and long-term success.

For example, one report found that sales organisations relying solely on extrinsic incentives saw turnover rates of over 35% within the first two years.

As a sales leader, it is our responsibility to design structures and an environment most conducive to healthy high performance.

Striking the Motivational Balance for Success

So, what balance of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation should we strive for? Lucky for us, the construction of motivation is a central theme in sales management research.

In my opinion, the single most impactful finding in the debate came from Good and colleagues, who used meta-analyses of 127 studies (totalling 77,650 salespeople) and found an effect size of r = .298 for intrinsic motivation on performance, compared with r = .176 for extrinsic motivation.

What does this tell us? Intrinsic motivation is the stronger predictor and influencer of salesperson performance. However, extrinsic motivation still matters and evidently shouldn’t be disregarded.

But that’s not all:

Intrinsically motivated salespeople are significantly more likely to pursue difficult prospects and persist after rejection, driving long-term revenue growth.

Teams high in intrinsic motivation demonstrate 31% higher rates of creative problem-solving, leading to more effective sales strategies and innovative approaches to client needs.

Hence, the balance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation depends on the nature of your sales. When sales are challenging, complex, or require innovation, intrinsic motivation is the key.

What Are We Suggesting?

So, what are we suggesting? Sales managers should aim for a “dual-fuel system” — use extrinsic motivators as accelerators and intrinsic motivators as the engine. Commission plans, paired with coaching, autonomy, and opportunities for mastery — that’s the sweet spot where healthy, high performance exists.

So, if that’s the balance, what can you do to get there? Well, I asked sales leaders from global organisations, and this is what they said

Interested in honing in your sales approach? Get in touch with the team