The late Australian billionaire Richard Pratt had a line he was fond of using with his people. “Encourage your team to be committed to a project rather than just involved in it. You know the difference, don’t you? In a meal of bacon and eggs, the chicken is involved. The pig is committed.”
It’s a good line. And the question it raises is one I find myself returning to constantly when I’m working with business owners who lead sales and business development teams. How many people on your team are genuinely committed? And how many are just turning up?
In my experience, the honest answer to that question is almost always directly connected to how well the business owner understands motivation. Not what they assume motivates people. What actually does.
The Engagement Numbers Are Worse Than You Think
Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report makes for uncomfortable reading. Global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, the second decline in twelve years, at a cost to the world economy of an estimated $438 billion in lost productivity.
The finding that should concern business owners most, though, is this one: the steepest drop was not among frontline employees. It was among managers. Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27% in a single year, while individual contributor engagement held flat.
Gallup’s research also shows that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. The people most responsible for motivating others are themselves the most disengaged group in the workplace right now.
That’s the environment your sales and business development team is operating in. And it makes the question of what actually drives motivation more important than it has been in a long time.
The Carrot Has a Problem
There’s an old joke that goes something like this. An old man, tired of being taunted by the neighbourhood kids, comes up with a plan. He offers each child a dollar to return the next day, which they do with gusto. He then tells them he can only pay 50 cents for the following day. The kids still show up, but the energy behind their insults noticeably drops. Then he tells them the rate for the third day will be five cents. “Forget it,” they say, and never come back.
Most business owners who run sales teams would recognise that story. The monetary incentive worked initially, but it fundamentally changed the kids’ relationship with the activity. Something they once did for free stopped feeling worth doing at all once the money dried up.
Dr Scott Jeffrey, whose research at Monmouth University examined cash versus non-cash motivation in sales environments, found something that surprises business owners every time I share it. People consistently state a strong preference for cash. And they consistently perform better when pursuing non-cash incentives.
“Either they don’t know what actually motivates them,” Jeffrey says, “or they know, but they’ve been raised to think cash is king.”
Cash does have its place. Competitive base salary and commission matter enormously. But used in isolation as the primary motivational lever, the research is consistent: it has a ceiling, and you hit it faster than you’d expect.
Intrinsic Motivation: The Three Drivers That Actually Move People
David Abusah, who spent years in talent leadership at PricewaterhouseCoopers, draws a clear distinction between extrinsic motivation, which drives people through reward or recognition, and intrinsic motivation, which comes from the work itself feeling meaningful.
“Sometimes organisations forget about the intrinsic aspect of motivation,” he says, “and just dangle a big carrot in front of their employees.”
The risk of over-indexing on extrinsic rewards, Abusah argues, is that you can start reducing the enrichment of a job. Make it too prescriptive, too transactional, and job satisfaction erodes in ways no bonus will fix.
In his book Drive, Daniel Pink built the case for intrinsic motivation with unusual clarity, drawing on decades of behavioural science research that had largely been ignored by the business world. His central argument is that once people are paid enough that money stops being a source of daily anxiety, financial incentives become surprisingly poor predictors of performance. What actually drives people to do their best work is something else entirely.
“The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table,” Pink has said. “Pay people enough so that they’re not thinking about the money. They’re thinking about the work.”
Once that threshold is met, three factors drive performance more powerfully and more durably than any financial incentive:
Autonomy is the desire to be self-directed, to have real ownership over how work gets done, not just what gets done. Pink’s argument is that management is highly effective at producing compliance. It is much less effective at producing genuine engagement, because compliance and engagement are fundamentally different things. The business owner who micromanages every call, every proposal, and every client interaction may get the minimum. The one who sets clear standards and then trusts their people to find their own way within them tends to get considerably more.
This is why Google’s 20% time policy became so influential — engineers given a portion of their week for self-directed projects produced AdSense and Google News, among others. Atlassian’s quarterly ShipIt Days, their 24-hour hackathons where people across every department can work on anything they believe matters, are built on the same principle. The structure gives people permission to care about something beyond their day job.
Mastery is the deeply human drive to get better at things. Pink points to open source software development as one of the purest expressions of this. Thousands of developers contributing to Linux or Wikipedia, giving their time and expertise entirely for free. Strange economic behaviour, on the surface. The explanation is simple: the challenge itself is the reward. The act of getting better at something difficult is intrinsically satisfying in a way that a cash bonus is not.
For business development teams, this has real implications. A salesperson who feels like they’re genuinely developing their craft, getting better at discovery, at navigating complex buying conversations, at building long-term commercial relationships, brings more to the role than one who feels like they’re running the same plays on repeat. Development is not just a retention tool. It’s a motivational engine.
Purpose is the need to feel connected to something larger than a personal revenue target. Pink describes this as what organisations tap into when they articulate a genuinely meaningful reason for existing, beyond profit. “More and more organisations want to have some kind of transcendent purpose,” he says, “partly because it makes coming to work better and partly because that’s the way to attract better talent.”
For business owners, the practical version of this is simpler than it might sound. It’s not about mission statements. It’s about making sure people understand why the work matters, who it helps, and what they’re actually part of. A business development team that understands the real impact of what they’re selling, on the clients they work with and the business they’re helping to build, will bring a different quality of effort to that work than one that just has a number to hit by the end of the month.
What This Looks Like in Practice
The question I hear most often from business owners at this point is a practical one: how do you apply this without dismantling your commission structure or losing grip on performance standards?
The answer is that you don’t have to choose between the two. The most motivated sales and business development teams I’ve worked with tend to share a few characteristics:
- Commission structures that are genuinely competitive, clear, and fair, so that money stops being a source of anxiety and distraction
- Meaningful coaching and development, where the business owner or team leader invests in helping people get genuinely better at the craft of selling
- Recognition that is personal and specific, which looks different for every individual and requires actually knowing your people
- A clear connection between the team’s work and something the business is genuinely trying to achieve, beyond the revenue target
- Enough autonomy in how people manage their time and client relationships that good salespeople feel trusted
None of this is complicated in principle. What makes it hard is that it requires business owners to think about their people as individuals with different motivational profiles, rather than a group that responds uniformly to the same incentives.
One Size Has Never Fitted All
David Heazlett, principal at HR and financial consultancy Mercer, puts it plainly. “Many effective reward programs for sales forces have both monetary and non-monetary components. More and more we are finding that people are prepared to take a more holistic view and understand how they fit together.”
His recommendation is to do what he calls employee sensing: actually asking your team what they value and why, rather than assuming you already know.
“Compare what motivates your 22-year-old outbound sales rep with your 40-year-old key account manager,” he says. “They are almost certainly different people with different drivers.”
This is something I see business owners get wrong constantly, not because they don’t care, but because it takes more effort than rolling out a standard incentive program. It means having conversations with your people that go beyond pipeline reviews and performance numbers. It means treating motivation as an ongoing leadership responsibility, not a problem you solve once with a comp plan and then leave alone.
When people feel that the way they’re recognised reflects who they actually are, the impact on discretionary effort is significant. And in business development, discretionary effort is the difference between someone who hits their number and someone who builds a book of business.
A Quick Reference: Intrinsic vs Extrinsic
It’s worth being clear on the definitions, because these terms get used loosely.
Intrinsic motivation is the internal drive that compels us toward a goal because the activity itself is rewarding. We do it because it matters to us, because we want to get better at it, or because it connects to something we believe in.
Extrinsic motivation is driven by an external outcome: a reward, a bonus, a recognition, or the avoidance of a consequence. We do it because of what we’ll get, not because of what we’ll feel.
The research is consistent: extrinsic rewards can boost performance on simple, repetitive tasks. For the kind of complex, relationship-driven, strategic work that defines high-value business development, intrinsic motivation is the stronger and more durable driver. Used together, and designed with the individual in mind, both can be powerful. Applied uniformly and in isolation, neither works as well as it should.
What the Best Business Owners Understand
Abusah puts it well. “Taking a holistic view of rewards is something we would advocate. You need to be very clear about the desired outcomes before you start, and recognise that we are talking about human beings driven by different things, both intrinsically and extrinsically. Think about whether one size fits all.”
The business owners who build the most motivated sales and business development teams are the ones who take that seriously. They invest in development. They create space for autonomy. They make the purpose of the work clear and meaningful. And they take the time to understand what drives each person on their team.
Richard Pratt was right. The difference between involvement and commitment is significant. Getting people to committed rather than just involved is the real work of leading a sales team. And it starts with understanding what actually motivates them.
