Every January, gyms fill up. Every February, they empty out. The people who left in February were not less motivated than the people who stayed. Many started with more. They had the New Year energy. And by Valentine's Day they were gone.
The ones who stayed were usually quieter about it. They did not rely on feeling motivated, because they understood, maybe without ever putting it into words, that motivation is weather. It comes and it goes. You cannot build anything on weather.
This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in sales management. We keep trying to motivate our way to performance. The pep talk. The kickoff with the loud music. The Monday email full of exclamation points. And then we are baffled when the lift lasts about as long as the gym membership.
It lasts about that long because motivation is a feeling, and feelings decay. The salesperson who needs to feel motivated in order to make calls is the salesperson who will stop the moment he does not feel like it, which, if we are honest, is most mornings, for most people, in a job built on rejection.
Motivation is about attitude. Standards are about behavior. One is weather. The other is something the weather cannot touch.
A standard is a defined behavior that happens regardless of how you feel about it. The salesperson on a standard makes thirty calls before noon because that is what he does, the way he brushes his teeth. The feeling is not consulted. And because it happens whether the weather is good or bad, it compounds.
Consider two salespeople. The first has a fantastic attitude, beloved at the kickoff, but no fixed standard, so his activity rises and falls with his mood. The second is less of a presence, but he has a standard and meets it on the good days and the bad days. Over a year, the second one quietly buries the first, and everyone is surprised, because they were watching the attitude instead of the behavior.
Here is the part that surprises people. Standards produce motivation, not the other way around. The salesperson who hits his standard every day, regardless of mood, develops something no pep talk can give him: self-respect, earned through evidence. He has proof, accumulated daily, that he is the kind of person who does what he said he would do.
So define the behavior in numbers a person can meet or miss without ambiguity. Make the standard about input, not just outcome, because a person controls his inputs and only influences his outcomes. And hold it gently but without exception, because an exception is just the standard quietly converting back into a feeling.
Stop trying to feel your way to performance. Define what you do. Then do it whether you feel like it or not, and let the feeling catch up, because it will.