The Myth of The Money-Motivated Sales Pro

In his book Drive, as in the 10-minute must see-video in my last post, author Dan Pink doesn't address the time-honored doctrine of the money-motivated sales hero.

That doctrine goes thus: Sure, maybe the rest of us would prefer to work for its own sake as long as it's stimulating and we're paying the bills, but what about sales heroes, those rain-makers whose very success is gaged solely by the size of their paycheck, the car they drive, the price of their suits; the lavish vacations their company rewards them with?

I myself have held firmly to this relic of 20th-Century motivation. But I've hoped for someone to show me a better way than my antiquated notion of "The sales-pro exception." So I emailed Dan for clarity.

Dan delivered, and now I'm an even bigger fan.

First, read this column from the Sunday Telegraph.

Follow it up with "some research coming out challenging other orthodoxies. Here, for instance, is some work just out of Stanford."

Quite humbly, Dan finished his reply with this:

"So there's no universal answer, but part of me suspects that salespeople aren't all that different from the rest of us."

Dan Pink's phenomenal work is a key component of how business will be done better in this exciting new century. Read it. Watch it. Absorb it. Most importantly, act on it!