Identify Salesperson Psychological Needs to Increase Sales - By: Daiv Russell

Motivation and retention of employees are two of the biggest challenges facing Sales Managers today. The rapidly-changing workplace of today mandates that employees stay motivated. Sales forces that stay motivated help businesses survive due to increased overall productivity. Motivation is the basis for survival for an organization, yet it is usually ignored as a business topic. There is no clear-cut and well-defined approach to tackling the challenge of employee motivation. Most companies usually ignore it unless a problem crops up.

There are various factors that motivate employees and they keep changing and entering into new stages of fulfillment. As employees' income increases, money becomes less of a motivator. Similarly as employees get older, interesting work becomes more of a motivator.

Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist who was a pioneer in humanistic counseling methods and coined the term 'trans-personal psychology'. Maslow believed that the need to develop a person's basic potential can take precedence over other motivators which may appear to be more evident.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs enlightens us on what motives people to seek out certain positions in life. The Hierarchy helps when it comes to sales Resource professionals determining how to best utilize the basic building blocks of human nature. There are five stages of the Hierarchy that explains an individuals needs and the order of importance.

Physiological needs which comprise Maslow's first tier are all about human survival. And this pertains to man's basic needs like, food water, shelter. These are considered the basics for it serves as the foundation of human's motivation. He believes that people should meet these needs before dealing with the concerns of safety, love and so forth.

The first four needs, which Maslow considered to be "deficiency needs", stop providing motivation when satisfied, and the final need - self-actualization - is a "being need" or "growth need" which drives behavior throughout a person's life. A business seeking a well-motivated workforce should continually provide opportunities for employees to meet self-actualization needs.

Self-actualization is intangible and thus hard to measure objectively. Two competing theories have developed. One school believes that people can never reach this state because there is always more development possible. The other school of thought believes that people reach this state temporarily for a short time, but then they develop new goals. Workers constantly seeking to achieve their potential tend to seek jobs where they have the autonomy and control so they can contribute in an important way and have lasting impact with their ideas.

About the Author

Daiv Russell is a management and marketing consultant with Envision Web Marketing. Read more Articles about Small Business Management, learn about Abraham Maslow and the Maslow theory.

Article Directory Source: http://www.articlerich.com/profile/Daiv-Russell/20690

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