How different are your salespeople in the marketplace? Are they unique enough to break through a very crowded marketplace?

As a sales leader, part of your role is helping your salespeople create a selling approach that stands out. Differentiating in sales is not just about having a better product or knowing more about your business. It is about giving people a reason to stop, listen and want to know more.

I recently started reading Seth Godin's Purple Cow again, and early in the book he tells a story about driving his family through France. Mile after mile, farm after farm, they saw brown cows. At first, the cows were interesting, but after a while, nobody stopped to look at them anymore.

And that is the question for you and your sales team: Do you look, act and sound like everybody else? Are you another brown cow?

What does your sales approach sound like?

Nobody wants to listen to another pitch, another presentation or another salesperson who sounds exactly like everyone else. The response is usually, "I've seen it before. I've heard it before. I'm not interested."

Your salespeople may be smart. They may know their business. They may be interesting and great to talk to. But if the impression in the marketplace is that they are just another brown cow, no one is going to stop the car.

The goal is to become remarkable, and remarkable simply means worth remarking on. You know you may be onto something when a prospect responds with, "Tell me more about that," "How do you do that?" or even, "That's me. We have that problem." Those reactions are very different from someone simply sitting through another sales presentation.

Be brave with your approach

In order to move from brown cow to purple cow, you have to be willing to be a little brave. You have to redesign your approach in a way that might make you slightly uncomfortable.

For example, when you call someone, try simply saying your name and then stop talking.

"Hi, this is Tony Cole."

And then be quiet.

Most salespeople immediately follow their name with a pitch. They tell the prospect who they are, what company they are with and why they are calling. Instead, create a little curiosity and then say, "Well, let me ask you a question."

That does not sound like the normal sales call. The prospect is used to hearing, "Let me tell you about..." You are asking instead, and that small difference can change the entire conversation.

Brown cow thinking vs. purple cow thinking

Brown cow thinking sounds like this: "This is what I know. This is what I do. This is how I do it. Do you want some?"

That is how a lot of selling still happens.

Purple cow thinking is different. You might say, "What we do is not for everybody. We work with a very specific group of organizations, and not everybody qualifies."

Now the conversation changes. Instead of trying to push the prospect toward you, you are creating a situation where they may start explaining why they should stay in the conversation. That is a very different selling dynamic.

Would someone stop and listen?

So here is the question worth asking: If someone heard one of your salespeople talking to a prospect about what they do, would they stop and listen? Would they interrupt and ask a question? Would they want to hear more, or would they keep walking because they have heard it all before?

Differentiating in sales requires your salespeople to be willing to rethink how they show up in the marketplace. Be brave with your approach, say something different, ask a better question and create enough curiosity that the prospect wants to continue the conversation.

Go be the purple cow.

A Tribute to Stephen Covey

Stephen Covey had a significant impact on my life and millions of other lives as well. I have read many of his books:

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families

• First Things First

• Principle-Centered Leadership

And this book, written by his son, Stephen M.R. Covey:

• The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything

The first book I read was The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Clearly a landmark book for Stephen, and a book that changed millions of lives. The most important concept I took from that book was "start with the end in mind." This is a common idea among many thought leaders in the area of self-improvement, productivity, and effectiveness. Decide what you want the outcome to be, then build the plan, the steps, and the path to get you there. As I think about Stephen, that book, and our success, I can clearly and easily state that this one concept has helped us succeed on many levels.

First Things First is all about priorities. Priorities get done; everything else is just talk. We often talk about priorities in our training sessions for both salespeople and sales managers. For salespeople, the only "A" priority is prospecting. It always has been, always will be. For sales managers, it's coaching. It is the priority that, when well executed, maximizes the people talent in which all companies invest. Nothing else has the same return.

The SPEED of Trust, written by Stephen's son Stephen, impressed me so much and, once again, it is a simple truth with big impact. Think about the relationships you have or hope to have with prospects, sales candidates, internal partners, and your sales team. The speed at which you develop a trusting relationship impacts any outcome you hope to have. Trust is established by focusing on the other person first. When preparing to conduct a coaching session or a performance management meeting, think about how the meeting might go if you start with "seek to understand" rather than "let me tell you..."

We lost a great business icon with the loss of Stephen Covey, the maker of small, efficient, and highly effective tools for our daily business and personal use. His books and the concepts they teach will continue to help us become the best versions of ourselves.

7 Sales Tips Inspired by Stephen Covey

Here are 7 sales tips inspired by reading Stephen's books:

Sales Tip 1: Be Proactive

Take initiative in life by recognizing that your decisions, and how they align with your life's principles, are the determining factor in your effectiveness. Take responsibility for your choices and the consequences that follow.

Sales Tip 2: Begin with the End in Mind

Self-discover and clarify your deeply important character values and life goals. Envision the ideal characteristics for each of your various roles and relationships in life. Create a mission statement for where you want your career to take you.

Sales Tip 3: Put First Things First

Prioritize, plan, and execute your week's tasks based on importance rather than urgency. Evaluate whether your efforts exemplify your desired character values, and whether they propel you toward your goals and enrich the roles and relationships outlined in Sales tip 2.

Sales Tip 4: Think Win-Win

Genuinely strive for mutually beneficial solutions or agreements in your relationships. Value and respect people by understanding that a "win" for all is ultimately a better long-term solution than if only one person in the situation had gotten his way.

Sales Tip 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

Use empathic listening and probing questions to genuinely understand a person, which typically will compel them to reciprocate with an open mind to being influenced by you. This creates an atmosphere of caring, respect, and positive problem-solving.

Sales Tip 6: Synergize

Combine the strengths of people through positive teamwork in order to achieve goals that no one person could have accomplished alone. Get the best performance out of a group of people by encouraging their meaningful contribution and modeling inspirational and supportive leadership.

Sales Tip 7: Sharpen the Saw

Balance and renew your resources, energy, and health to create a sustainable, long-term, effective lifestyle. This emphasizes exercise for physical renewal, as well as, for many, prayer, meditation, yoga, and good reading for mental renewal. It also includes service to society for community building and support.

What sales tips would you contribute to this list? As a sales leader, focusing on self-improvement issues like this makes for a great team discussion.

Quoting is not qualifying. We often must remind salespeople that "You are not a Quote Jockey. You don't make commissions on quotes. You don't need the practice of quoting. You don't need to help the current vendor by supplying the buyer with your information. You don't need to make the buyer smarter. And you don't need to waste your time, your effort or the resources of your company quoting on something that you have less than a good chance of selling."

So, stop quoting and start qualifying prospects who fit the profile of your ideal client. Start qualifying these prospects for "severe mental anguish" - the motivation to buy your product or service. Start qualifying them for their motivation to leave their current vendor relationship. Start qualifying them for their sense of urgency and ability to invest the resources required to buy.

How do great salespeople do this? Here are four tips on qualifying prospects more effectively:

Tip 1: Know Who You Should Be Selling To

If you don't already know who you should be selling to, you need only look as far as your book of business (or the book of the most successful salesperson you know) and determine which clients make you the most money. Typically, 20% of your clients account for 80% of your revenue.

Tip 2: Ask for Introductions, Not Referrals

Select 5-10 of your clients, provide them with your target prospect, and ask them if they know anyone who looks like that and, if so, ask them for an introduction. If you want to learn a very comfortable way to do this, watch our Sales Brew on Getting Introductions. This will help you clearly understand the difference between asking for a referral and an introduction.

Tip 3: Qualify Prospects for Severe Mental Anguish

Once you have a list of prospects and appropriate decision-makers and you get the opportunity to meet, you must begin qualifying for severe mental anguish - the prospect's motivation to buy your product or service.

This is tricky. You will have to get past the surface discussion that invariably happens at initial sales meetings. You will want to drill down past the first indication of a problem (pain indicator). Most salespeople, when they uncover the initial indications of a problem, stop digging and go immediately to their solution and begin pitching. At this point in the relationship, this is inappropriate since you don't yet know if the problem is big or bad enough to motivate the prospect to take action or if they even have a budget.

Drill down. Gain more information. Ask great questions so that they continue talking about the problem. Get them emotionally involved.

This takes practice. Here is another tip to qualifying prospects: the Rule of 3R. This means asking the Right question, the Right way, at the Right time. If you learn how to do this, you will help the buyer discover that they have a problem and that they want to fix the problem. Then they will ask you if your product or service can make the problem go away. This is a much better way to qualify a prospect, to help them self-discover.

A Sample Approach to Qualifying Prospects

Here is a sample approach for qualifying prospects (this needs to be planned, not canned). Once you ask your initial question that gets a pain indicator response, e.g., "I'm unhappy with...?", you say the following:

• "Tell me more about that." Ask in a nurturing way and then don't say anything. Let them respond.

• "And?" Ask like it's a question - they will keep talking.

• "How long has that been a problem?" Don't step over your own question. Ask it and don't say anything. Let them think. Don't be tempted to talk just because there is silence.

• "What has your current vendor done to help you with this problem?" If they say "Nothing," then you should respond with, "Hmmm, I wonder why."

• If they indicate that the current vendor has done something, you should respond with, "How is that working?" Keep in mind if it were working, you wouldn't be there.

• "How much will it cost if you don't fix the problem?"

• "Is the problem bad enough for you to undo your current vendor relationship?"

• "Do you want to fix the problem?" Assume they say "yes."

• "Are you sure?"

• "Suppose (magic word) we could fix the problem, what would happen next?"

You must have the ability to listen carefully to what the prospect is saying because that will lead you to your next question and will help you get closer to the emotion associated with the problem. Remember, you are trying to get to real emotion because this is what will motivate the prospect to buy. And, if there is not enough emotion, you don't have a real prospect.

Of course, qualifying for money is equally important, and you will want to make sure there is a budget for solving the problem.

Tip 4: Know When to Walk Away

Tip 4 is the most important tip on qualifying prospects: if you are unable to qualify a prospect for mental anguish to solve a real and immediate problem with real available money, then it's time to move on to the next prospect. Don't waste your time trying to create a buyer where none exists. Sure, you can ask and add them to your database to stay in touch, but they do not belong in your pipeline.

Unfortunately, most salespeople keep non-prospects in their pipelines when they should be eliminating them. These non-prospects take up time and energy that should be directed to finding new contacts, qualifying real prospects and selling.

Managers, use these tips on qualifying prospects at your next sales meeting. Drive a discussion and do some role play around those drill-down questions. Your #1 job is to help your salespeople become more effective in qualifying and closing more business.

Building a high-performance sales team is a lot like preparing a great meal. You need the right ingredients, a reliable process, and someone who knows how to bring everything together. In sales, the science comes from measurable activities, data, and systems, while the art comes from how well your team communicates, connects with prospects, and executes. When sales leaders understand how to balance both, they are better equipped to coach their people, improve performance, and create sustainable growth.

Cooking Up a High-Performance Sales Team

Many Christmases ago, my wife, Linda, gave me a cookbook called The Science of Good Cooking.

It was a fitting gift because I genuinely enjoy cooking, mostly because I genuinely enjoy eating. I am not the type of cook who spends hours preparing elaborate gourmet dishes. Give me meat, potatoes, pasta, soup, barbecue, stew, or a good sandwich, and I am happy. Vegetables are a different story, although ratatouille, steamed broccoli, and sautéed French green beans occasionally make the cut.

For years, I approached cooking mostly through instinct and experimentation. Over time, however, I learned that every successful dish involves both science and art.

The science explains why certain techniques work:

• Cooking meat low and slow helps break down tough proteins and creates a more tender result.
• Resting meat allows the juices to redistribute.
• Measuring temperature is more reliable than guessing whether something is finished.
• The right balance of heat, time, and ingredients can be the difference between dinner and disaster.

Once you understand the science, you can begin adding your own art.

The food becomes your canvas. You can adjust the seasoning, experiment with ingredients, and make the finished dish your own. Personally, I like a little extra zing, so cayenne pepper, red pepper flakes, Tabasco, jalapeños, butter, and half-and-half tend to find their way into my recipes.

The same combination of art and science is required to build a high-performance sales team.

The Science of Sales Performance

The science of sales growth is found in the activities, measurements, systems, and standards that consistently produce results.

In other words, it begins with effort.

Your salespeople may generate opportunities by:

1. Networking within the communities and industries they serve
2. Calling prospects and following up with existing contacts
3. Using LinkedIn and other platforms to build relationships
4. Meeting with internal partners who have access to ideal prospects
5. Delivering an exceptional client experience that creates advocates
6. Asking satisfied clients for introductions
7. Building relationships with referral partners
8. Writing, speaking, and presenting to establish expertise

These are the ingredients.

However, owning all the right ingredients does not automatically produce a great meal. Your team must consistently use them, measure them, and follow a process that gives those activities the best opportunity to succeed.

This is where sales leadership becomes critical.

Most organizations have a CRM that collects plenty of data. But a CRM is simply a kitchen full of equipment. It cannot determine whether your team is following the recipe, using the right ingredients, or producing the desired result.

Sales leaders must:

• Identify the activities and metrics that matter most
• Establish performance standards that encourage growth
• Connect those activities to a defined sales process
• Create individual sales success formulas
• Compare actual performance with goals
• Measure conversion ratios at each stage of the process
• Use business intelligence to predict future performance
• Compare those predictions with actual outcomes

The purpose of the data is not simply to document what already happened. It should help leaders determine what is likely to happen next and what adjustments need to be made now.

The Art of Sales Execution

Effort tells you what your salespeople are doing.

Execution tells you how well they are doing it.

Two salespeople can complete the same number of calls, meetings, presentations, and follow-ups while producing dramatically different results. The difference is often found in the art of selling.

Consider the following questions:

• How well does the salesperson ask questions?
• Do they uncover meaningful insight or simply gather basic facts?
• Can they use stories, metaphors, and examples to make their message memorable?
• How well do they understand and respond to emotion?
• Do they sound confident and engaging during an initial phone call?
• Can they command attention when presenting?
• Do they communicate differently from every other salesperson competing for the prospect’s time?
• Are they passionate, committed, and willing to do the necessary work while maintaining ethical, legal, and professional standards?

These skills are difficult to capture in a spreadsheet, but they frequently determine whether an opportunity advances or disappears.

The science may tell you that a salesperson completed 20 prospecting calls. The art determines whether anyone wanted to continue the conversation.

Coaching Is Where Art and Science Come Together

Building a high-performance sales team requires managers to evaluate both effort and execution.

The data helps identify where performance is breaking down. Coaching helps improve it.

For example, the numbers may reveal that a salesperson is scheduling plenty of first appointments but converting very few of them into qualified opportunities. That is the science.

The manager must then determine why.

Is the salesperson asking weak questions? Are they talking too much? Are they failing to uncover urgency? Are they presenting solutions before fully understanding the problem? Do they struggle to discuss money, decision-making, or commitment?

That diagnosis and the coaching conversation that follows represent the art.

Effective sales coaches must:

• Build relationships based on trust and confidence
• Understand what truly motivates each salesperson
• Ask questions that help people discover their own solutions
• Hold the team accountable to meaningful standards
• Refuse to normalize mediocrity
• Avoid allowing a need for approval to weaken accountability
• Prioritize the success and development of their people

Great coaching is not about giving more instructions. It is about using the available data to identify the right coaching opportunity and then helping the salesperson change their behavior.

Your Sales Team Needs More Than a Recipe

A great recipe provides structure, but it still requires someone who understands how to execute it.

The same is true in sales.

Your CRM, sales process, activity standards, and performance metrics provide the science. Your team’s communication skills, emotional intelligence, confidence, creativity, and ability to connect with prospects provide the art.

Strong sales leaders know how to combine both.

Too much focus on activity can create a team that stays busy without producing results. Too much focus on personality and instinct can create inconsistent performance that is difficult to repeat or scale.

A high-performance sales team needs the right ingredients, a proven recipe, consistent execution, and a coach who knows when to turn up the heat.

That is how you cook up sustainable sales growth.

This article was originally published by Objective Management Group and written by Kate Barsby. It is shared here with permission. Anthony Cole Training Group is a Certified OMG Partner, helping organizations hire and develop high-performing sales teams using OMG’s industry-leading assessments and insights.

Sales organizations spend heavily on commission structures and contests, assuming money is what drives their salespeople. Objective Management Group’s assessment data tells a different story: only 27% of salespeople are primarily extrinsically motivated, while 52% are driven intrinsically, and just 5% are motivated by a sense of purpose or altruism. Only 17% show a balanced mix across these motivation types, meaning most salespeople depend on a single source of drive rather than several reinforcing ones. This matters because third-party research shows intrinsic motivation is a stronger predictor of sales performance than extrinsic reward, which means the lever most companies pull may not be the one moving the number they care about. The article examines what OMG’s motivation data reveals about how salespeople are actually wired, and what that means for how organizations should structure compensation, coaching, and recognition. 

The Predictor Everyone Underrates

Motivation gets treated as a given in most sales organizations. Leaders assume it’s there, assume it’s uniform, and assume the comp plan is the dial that controls it. None of those assumptions hold up well under data.

A landmark meta-analysis of the determinants of salesperson performance found motivation ranks among the strongest predictors of how well a salesperson performs, trailing only role clarity and skill level.¹ That finding is decades old, yet most sales organizations still treat motivation as a single, undifferentiated force rather than something with distinct types that respond to different levers.

Motivation is not one thing. It comes from at least three distinct sources, and salespeople rarely draw on all three equally.

Objective Management Group’s assessment data shows 77% of salespeople are strong in the overall Motivation competency.² On the surface, that looks like good news. But strong overall motivation says nothing about what kind of motivation is driving that number, and the breakdown behind it changes the picture considerably.

Three Kinds of Drive, One Word

Sales leaders often use “motivation” as shorthand for a single trait, the way they might describe someone as tall or organized. In practice, motivation splits into three distinct categories, each with a different trigger and a different shelf life.

Extrinsic Motivation

This is the driver most sales organizations design for. Salespeople with strong extrinsic motivation respond to commission, bonuses, contests, rank, and recognition tied to results. It is visible, quantifiable, and easy for a sales manager to pull as a lever. It also tends to plateau. Once a salesperson reaches a stable income level, additional increases in extrinsic reward produce diminishing returns.³

Intrinsic Motivation

Salespeople with strong intrinsic motivation are driven by the work itself. They find satisfaction in solving a customer’s problem, mastering a skill, or simply winning the deal for the sake of winning it. This type of motivation does not depend on an external reward showing up on schedule, which is part of what makes it durable.

Altruistic Motivation

The least common of the three. Altruistically motivated salespeople sell because they believe in the value they are delivering to the customer or the mission behind the product. Research on purpose-driven selling found that a belief in contributing to something larger than oneself was more strongly related to sales effort and performance over time than a desire for financial reward.⁴ It is a powerful driver where it exists, but OMG’s data shows it exists in very few salespeople.

Three different engines require three different kinds of fuel. A sales organization built entirely around extrinsic incentives is optimizing for the driver that is weakest on average and least durable over time, while leaving the other two largely unaddressed.

The Imbalance Hiding Inside a Strong Number

OMG’s data gets specific once you break the Motivation competency into its parts. Among salespeople assessed, the average competency scores are as follows:

Intrinsic motivation nearly doubles extrinsic motivation as the dominant driver among salespeople, and altruistic motivation barely registers. Perhaps more telling is the balanced motivation figure. Only 17% of salespeople draw meaningfully on more than one type of motivation. The remaining 83% are running on a single primary source of drive.

A salesperson who is motivated almost entirely by intrinsic satisfaction will struggle when the work becomes repetitive, undifferentiated, or stuck in a slump with no immediate sense of mastery to draw on. A salesperson who is motivated almost entirely by extrinsic reward will struggle the moment a territory shrinks, a comp plan changes, or a market softens. Neither has a second source of drive to fall back on.

A sales force with low balanced motivation is more fragile than its overall Motivation score suggests. Strong average scores can mask a team that is one bad quarter, one comp plan change, or one flat month away from a motivation problem that looks sudden but was actually always there.

Why the Lever Most Companies Pull Is the Weakest One

The instinct to fix a motivation problem with money is understandable. It is fast, visible, and easy to approve in a budget meeting. It is also, according to the research, not the lever with the strongest connection to performance.

A meta-analytic review spanning more than 77,000 salespeople found that intrinsic motivation is significantly more strongly associated with sales performance than extrinsic motivation.⁵ External motivators such as compensation and bonuses do correlate with performance, but the relationship is weaker, and it weakens further once a salesperson has reached a stable income level.⁵

This is not a hypothetical mismatch. The research points to intrinsic motivation as the stronger performance predictor.⁵OMG’s data shows extrinsic motivation, the type companies invest the most in cultivating, is also the least common dominant driver among salespeople, at just 27%. Intrinsic motivation, meanwhile, is already the dominant driver for 52% of the sales force, largely without organizational investment. Altruistic motivation, which research suggests can be a particularly durable driver when present,⁴ sits nearly untapped at 5%.

Organizations may be spending the most money on the lever with the least leverage, while the driver already doing most of the work goes largely unsupported.

What High-Performing Organizations Are Doing Differently

The organizations getting this right are not abandoning commission structures. They are recognizing that comp plans alone are addressing one type of motivation while ignoring the other two, and they are building parallel systems to reach the salespeople who are not primarily wired for extrinsic reward.

This looks less like a new incentive program and more like a diagnostic shift. Sales managers who know whether a rep is intrinsically, extrinsically, or altruistically driven can coach accordingly. An intrinsically motivated rep responds to autonomy, mastery opportunities, and recognition of skill, not just a bigger number on a spiff sheet. A rep with any altruistic drive responds to a clear line between their work and the customer’s outcome, something most sales training never makes explicit.

The organizations doing this well are also treating the 17% balanced-motivation figure as a target rather than a curiosity. They are deliberately building both intrinsic and extrinsic reinforcement into the same role, on the logic that a salesperson with two sources of drive is more resilient than one running on a single engine, regardless of how strong that one engine is.

Final Thoughts

Motivation is not a single dial, and treating it like one leaves most of a sales organization’s potential untouched. OMG’s data shows that the driver companies invest in most heavily, extrinsic reward, is the one carrying the least weight for the majority of salespeople and the weakest connection to performance in the research. Intrinsic motivation, already the dominant force in half the sales force, and altruistic motivation, present in almost none of it, remain largely unaddressed by most sales management practices.

The more durable path is not choosing one lever over another. It is understanding which lever each salesperson actually responds to, and building toward the 17% who have more than one.

References

1. Churchill, Gilbert A., Neil M. Ford, Steven W. Hartley, and Orville C. Walker. “The Determinants of Salesperson Performance: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Marketing Research, 1985. 
2. Objective Management Group. Finding Statistics Tool. Average Motivation Competency Scores 1/1/2025 – 12/31/2025 and % of those proficient in Competency 1/1/2025 – 12/31/2025. 
3. Keller Center for Research, Baylor University. “Improving Salesperson Performance: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation.” 2023. https://kellercenter.hankamer.baylor.edu/news/story/2023/improving-salesperson-performance-intrinsic-vs-extrinsic-motivation 
4. McLeod, Lisa Earle. “New Research Reveals Unexpected Source Of Sales Motivation.” Forbes, April 10, 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisaearlemcleod/2020/04/10/new-research-reveals-unexpected-source-of-sales-motivation/ 
5. Miao, Chen Fang, et al. “A Self-Determination Theory-Based Meta-Analysis on the Differential Effects of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation on Salesperson Performance.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2022. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-021-00827-6