Motivating Salespeople to Sell New Products: What Makes Them Try Harder to Spur on Sales?

Product innovation has become increasingly important as a means for ensuring a competitive advantage, growth and financial success in today’s ultracompetitive business environment. To build a competitive advantage, pay off development and start-up costs and to generate cash, it is desirable to be successful from the start. In B2B markets, in particular, the sales force plays a key role in making sales grow quickly and generating cash to fuel further growth. It is therefore in companies’ interest to support their sales force as effectively as possible to enable them to fulfill this key task. According to a study on the sales of two different innovations at a global industrial company, the recipe for high sales performance is fairly straightforward: if salespeople are willing to try harder, their higher levels of effort lead to higher performance. But the simplest and most frequently used attempt to motivate is not the most effective: producing considerable management attention and promotion opportunities for salespeople who meet and exceed established expectations both show limited success. Rather, increased sales are facilitated by an approach that builds on the principle of intrinsic motivation. If management puts emphasis on increasing the inherent attractiveness of selling the new product, as well as on increasing a salesperson’s belief in his or her ability to sell the product, the positive impact on sales is stronger. Therefore, managers should apply normative incentives judiciously. For better new product performance, it seems more advisable to treat salespeople as the first “customers” and reinforce a positive attitude towards the task in early selling attempts.