One of the biggest challenges facing Sales Managers today is motivating and retaining employees. Motivation is an organization’s life-blood; yet “motivation,” as a business subject, is largely ignored. Motivated employees are needed in rapidly changing workplaces. Motivated sales teams help organizations survive simply because they are more productive. Seldom is a clear, coherent, and overall approach taken to the challenge of motivating people. Most organizations don’t give it much thought until something starts to go wrong.

There are many variables that will motivate employees to continue working towards new levels of satisfaction. Money becomes less of an issue as an employee’s income becomes higher. As an employee ages, work that is interesting is more of a factor.

Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who pioneered humanistic counseling methods. He also came up with the term “trans-personal psychology”. He theorized that a person’s need to develop their basic potential can transcend other factors that seem more obvious.

Maslow made an important contribution to psychology when he pioneered “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” This five tier model explains human needs in terms of how much value they assign them, thereby shedding much light on what motivates certain people to seek out certain positions. Sales Resource professionals can use this information to decide how to use the basic components of human nature most effectively.

The first tier which is defined as physiological needs, relates to the need for survival, food, water and shelter, and is the most prominent need to shape man’s motivation. Maslow believes people attempt to satisfy these needs in a specific order. A person will strive to meet physiological needs before addressing needs for 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.

There are two popular schools of thoughts behind the concept of self actualization. According to one school, we are always in pursuit of achieving self-actualization and the other school propounds that we do achieve the temporary self actualization but the moment we accomplish that we set another goal and start putting the effort to actualize that goal. Those who strive to realize their potential are looking for such opportunity and position from where their idea can take a concrete shape and blossom to prosper.

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