It is the end of the period, and you must motivate your sales team to close opportunities to meet your revenue goals. What do you do?

If you know and understand the behavioral science that drives our human actions. Pursuing short-term goals is full of unintended consequences.

As William H. Murphy, Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, highlights in his research, “In pursuit of Short-Term Goals: Anticipating the Unintended Consequences of using Special Incentives to Motivate the Sales Force.”

“…short-term pressures can leave salespeople feeling torn by feelings of compromises to long-term goals (Dwyer et al., 1987; Dubinsky et al., 1992), which can include sacrificing long-term growth and profit (Metzger et al., 1993). This is all the more damaging when a focus on short-term goals leads salespeople to engage in behaviors that do not remain within accepted practices.”

In his research he explored the answers to the question: To what extent should management expect a salesperson to engage in problematic behaviors in pursuing targeted goals and under what conditions are these behaviors more likely? (Problematic behavior is defined as including a broad range of behaviors that would be discouraged by management due to falling outside company value/ethics expectations or are not aligned with the spirit of these expectations)

To prevent or mitigate problematic behavior within the sales team, sales leaders need to be aware that even with company policies in place, the focus on achieving short term goals may lead some team members to deviate from company policy. To aid in this effort, Murphy, identifies seven variables that can link to problematic behavior – age, education, rank, affective commitment, relationship to supervisor, status aspiration, and competitiveness.

The research was divided into two sections: Sales Managers and Salesperson. For the sales manager portion he defined seven problematic behaviors and had the sales manager rank their severity. They behaviors are (in descending order of severity):

1. Make occasional exaggerated claims of targeted offerings
2. Reduce helping out/sharing info with other salespeople
3. Acceptance of otherwise questionable credit risks
4. Set aside other responsibilities
5. Overemphasis of contest-related products with customers who might be better suited for other offerings
6. Encourage closer customers to make extra purchases ahead of schedule
7.  

For the salesperson portion, sales people were presented with a short-term goal that was designed to evoke high motivation for goal attainment. Following this, intentions to use problematic behaviors were measured using the seven variables – age, education, rank, affective commitment, relationship to supervisor, status aspiration, and competitiveness.

His findings indicated that:

1. Companies with organizational safeguards in place (corporate reputations, codes, and reinforcement mechanisms encouraging ethical behavior) may find themselves in situations where highly problematic behaviors are reduced or eliminated from their sales forces.
2. These safeguards may not have an effect on moderately or lesser problematic behaviors.
3. Companies must distinguish between highly and lesser problematic behaviors.
4. Younger, less educated, and/or lower-rank salespeople will be more prone to engage in problematic behaviors
5. More educated salespeople, rather than being less prone to engage in problematic behaviors, may simply be more adept at engaging in only those problematic behaviors where risk of discovery is low and where few consequences result if discovery occurs.
6. Salespeople with closer relationships to their supervisors do not want to risk compromising this relationship through the use of problematic behaviors.
7. Status aspiration was associated with an increased likelihood of moderately and lesser problematic behaviors while competitiveness was associated with the entire spectrum of problematic behaviors.

It is interesting to note that competitiveness, one of the traits we look for and admire in a salesperson, is associated with greater tendencies for the highly problematic behaviors.

The message is clear here – sales leaders must be vigilant for intentions. Manifested or not they suggests a psychological readiness to engage in problematic behavior.

The next time you pursue short term goals, know that there unintended consequences.

Image: Money Bag$ Mackenzie Freemire