Many parents, including yours truly, have made the same mistake. Let’s call it the Ice Cream Effect. “Score a goal junior, and we buy you an ice cream cone!”, we might say. Score two and you get a hot-fudges sundae! Sooner or later, we find our child needs an ever-increasing supply of ice cream (or trophies, or other incentives) just to play the sport.
Why does this happen? Isn’t generous pay for a hard day’s work, an effective tradition? In the short term, yes. When our sales numbers are good and we’re getting praised, we love sales. Can we blame our leaders for dangling trips, bonuses, and other rewards in front of us?
But, hurry and enjoy your sales incentives quick, before they melt away! Soon, a new fiscal year arrives and we’re back to square one. Impossible objections, indecisive customers, and service issues, they’re all part of life in sales. All of a sudden, we not in love anymore. Instead, we’re the kid who hates baseball until he hits a home run. Here’s the problem: to our employers, our job is to sell. To our customers (you know, the people who pay for everything), it’s to solve problems. They don’t care how many rewards we rack up.
And, it’s solving problems that gets us the sales we want. We need to take the leap of faith required to focus on the job itself, not sales incentives, or even job security. Soldiers, who risk much more than a pink slip, want to see live battle. ER doctors, who can easily handle patients with sinus infections, want to treat traumatic injuries. These people want to do the hardest parts of their job.
Perhaps we in sales can learn from them.
Sincerely,
Meaning2work.com