Sales Management Style – The Positive Motivator

“You can attract more bees with honey than with vinegar.” Though its a bit of a non sequitur, the intent of this cliche illustrates a truth in human relations. So, it doesn’t take tremendous genius to recognize that a Positive Motivator Management Style (for Sales or for any other discipline) is, generally, more productive. But, as they say “back home”, that can say easy and do hard. The remaining question is how do you best implement this truth, as a Sales Leader?


A great lesson on this topic comes from Harvey McKay’s renowned book “Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive.” McKay’s encouragement is to “catch people doing something right”, to harness the power of praise. This has been the foundation for what I’ve put into practice and I’d like to share one of my favorite examples:

Its not uncommon to hear that Sales “is a numbers game”. And, just as there is truth in the “bees to honey” cliche, its hard to deny that Sales clearly has a numbers-driven quality. My experience has been that Inside/Direct Sales Organizations are more comprehensive in doing this … capturing “talk time”, number of calls (inbound and outbound), time between calls, conversion rate, etc. Unfortunately, its also not uncommon to see numbers used in a punitive way in a Sales Organization. Ironically, one of my favorite stories of taking a different, Positive Motivator, approach to this comes from work I did in the Call Center of a premiere Direct Sales Organization … Nautilus. Here, we developed a program called “The Voice of Nautilus”, with the intent being to “catch people doing something right” and to encourage them to do more and more of it. In the Direct Sales arena there are certain basic “measurements” (some of them being legal requirements) that must be met. “The Voice of Nautilus” takes those things into full consideration but it focuses more on how well a Sales Professional actually “helped” a Customer. A good example here would be, did the Sales Professional hear that a Customer was interested in a specific device and then proceed to sell the features of the device or did they listen closely enough to hear that the Customer was calling because they wanted to be thinner and in better shape by the time of their next class reunion, thus the Sales Professional proposed the right device along with all the right accessories, a weight loss program, etc.? In addition to being a source of growth for individual Sales Professionals, this program is a source of development for the Direct Sales Organization, in general, inasmuch as it involves Sales Supervisors listening to recorded calls and submitting the calls they select to the Sales Training staff for determination of the winner/s.

Regardless of its implementation, having a Positive Motivator Style in your Sales Management is another foundational key to having a successful Sales Organization. What are your thoughts on this? What are your favorite stories, along these lines, that you’d like to share?!