What’s Motivating Your Sales Team?

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