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FEATURESTORY
What A Woman Wants
When talking incentives, every saleswoman is moved by something different, but cigars and strip bars are not the best place to start.
A large life insurance company that sales coach Christine McMahon works with recognized individuals’ success with rounds of golf, new golf clubs or tickets to see the local professional baseball team. Guess who wasn’t always thrilled into action?
“Everybody is motivated differently, yet the one thing that most sales managers don’t do a good job of is talking with each team member about what motivates them. If you as a leader inspire your team to do their best for their reasons, guess what?” she says.
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Mariann Judge, a sales superstar at Xerox for more than two decades, says the company was an early adopter of developing diverse sales forces, but it took longer for executives to figure out women want different rewards than men.
“When I first started making President’s Club trips in 1984, it was wrapped around golf.” Judge has made President’s Club – the annual incentive trip for the top 10 percent of the sales force – 15 times since that initial trip and has enjoyed watching the program evolve to become more inclusive, namely, finding destinations that have more to offer than lush golf courses and putting together entertainment programs for non-golfers. “They’ve done a lot of things to make it more inviting.”
“Not everyone is emotionally engaged by the same things, in the same way, at the same time,” says Tim Houlihan, Vice President of Reward Systems at BI, a Minneapolis-based business improvement company (www.biperf.com).
In fact, what motivates a person may seem illogical, but who are you to argue? Houlihan tells the story of Arthur, a line repairman for a major telecommunications company who worked diligently to save enough points in his employee recognition program for a personal watercraft even though his Texas home was miles away from water deep enough to enjoy it.
“The bad news is each and every one of your employees has his or her own personal Jet Ski. The good news is each and every one of your employees has his or her own personal Jet Ski,” Houlihan says. “As a manager, you’ve got the power to discover what emotionally engages your team members – and then help them go for it.”
“Everybody is motivated differently, yet the one thing that most sales managers don’t do a good job of is talking with each team member about what motivates them.”
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See also in the article: A Woman's Place
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