What gets a salesperson out of bed in the morning? For decades, the default answer from businesses and researchers alike has been straightforward: money. Commissions, bonuses, contests, and quotas have long been the go-to tools for motivating sales teams. But a growing body of evidence suggests the answer may be more complex, especially as younger workers enter the profession with different expectations about what work should mean to them.
A three-part research project published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science set out to investigate whether salespeople are driven by something beyond their paychecks. The central finding: a personal “sense of purpose,” defined as the belief that one is contributing to a cause greater and more enduring than oneself, appears to be a significant driver of the internal motivation that keeps salespeople working hard and adapting their approach over time.
Why researchers looked beyond the paycheck
Valerie Good, a marketing professor at Grand Valley State University, led the study alongside Douglas E. Hughes and Hao Wang, both at the University of South Florida. The team observed that the vast majority of recent research on salesperson motivation had focused on monetary tools like financial incentives, compensation structures, and sales contests. Very few studies had examined what happens inside a salesperson’s head when money is not the primary draw.
This gap seemed increasingly important because of a demographic shift. Millennials, the generation born roughly between 1981 and 1996, now represent the largest segment of the American workforce. Previous research and popular press coverage have suggested that younger workers tend to seek jobs where they feel they can make a difference, not just earn a living. Yet most sales organizations continued to operate on the assumption that money is the main motivator.
The researchers grounded their work in a well-known psychological framework called Self-Determination Theory, or SDT. This theory holds that people are most internally motivated when three basic psychological needs are met: autonomy (feeling in control of how they do their work), competence (feeling skilled and capable), and relatedness (feeling connected to others). The research team suspected there might be a fourth ingredient missing from this model, at least when it comes to salespeople.
Listening to salespeople talk about what drives them
The first of the three studies was qualitative. The lead author conducted 18 in-depth interviews with salespeople from a range of industries, including both business-to-business and direct-to-consumer sales. The interviews lasted between 25 and 55 minutes and were conducted in person, by phone, or over video.
The questions were open-ended. Salespeople were asked what motivated them at work in general, what pushed them to go the extra mile on a Friday afternoon, and what kept them going during tough stretches. The researchers then coded the responses, looking for recurring themes.
Alongside the expected themes of autonomy, competence, connection, and compensation, a new theme appeared repeatedly: a sense of purpose. Many salespeople described being driven by the feeling that their work helps people or contributes to society in some meaningful way.
One striking example came from the top salesman at a wheel manufacturer. He described starting each morning with urgency because he knew that selling high-quality wheels for tractor-trailers meant fewer catastrophic highway accidents. “I work hard because I know that moms and dads are returning safely home to their families when I make sales,” he told the interviewer. He had outsold his company’s production capacity within the first three months of the year.
Another salesperson, an award winner at her firm, described her motivation in terms of helping struggling small businesses with tax and accounting services. “Nothing motivates me more than hearing a customer call me and say, ‘you saved my small business,'” she said.
The researchers noted that this sense of purpose is different from simply being customer-oriented, which means trying to make individual customers happy. A salesperson with a strong sense of purpose might even push back against what a customer wants in the short term if they believe a different product or service would be better for the customer or society in the long run. An adhesives salesman illustrated this point, explaining that he advocated for higher-quality windshield glue even when purchasing agents preferred a cheaper option, because he believed it saved lives.
Building a way to measure sense of purpose
The second study was designed to create a reliable tool for measuring this newly identified concept. The team wrote 18 potential survey questions based on their definition of sense of purpose and then refined them with feedback from subject matter experts. The final scale included eight items, such as “my work allows me to make a contribution to society” and “the work I do on my job impacts the lives of others.”
This scale was tested with 199 salespeople recruited from an online panel, representing a mix of industries. The average age was 30, and average sales experience was about five and a half years. Using statistical techniques including factor analysis, the researchers demonstrated that their new sense-of-purpose measure was distinct from a related but different concept called “job meaningfulness.” Job meaningfulness, as defined in prior research, refers to feeling that one’s work is important to the organization. Sense of purpose, by contrast, is about feeling that one’s work benefits people or society beyond the company walls.
The statistical tests confirmed that these two concepts, while related, are not the same thing. For instance, job meaningfulness was more strongly linked to performance orientation (a focus on task performance) and to feelings of connection with coworkers. Sense of purpose, on the other hand, was more strongly linked to customer orientation (a focus on serving customer needs).
Testing the impact on real sales performance
The third study moved from measurement to impact. The researchers partnered with a U.S.-based financial services firm and collected both survey data and objective performance records for 114 salespeople across four consecutive sales cycles, yielding 456 total observations.
The salespeople at this firm sold over the phone, had individual goals, and earned a mix of base pay plus commissions tied to quota attainment. Their actual number of calls and their percentage of sales quota achieved were tracked in company records, providing objective measures of effort and performance that did not rely on self-reporting.
To analyze this data, the team used a dynamic modeling approach that tracked how motivation related to effort and performance over time, rather than capturing a single snapshot. This method accounts for the fact that a salesperson’s performance in one month is partly shaped by their performance the month before.
The results supported the researchers’ predictions across the board. Sense of purpose was positively linked to intrinsic motivation even after accounting for the three previously known drivers (autonomy, competence, and connection). In other words, feeling that one’s work contributes to something larger appeared to add something to internal motivation that the other three factors alone did not capture.
Intrinsic motivation, in turn, was positively linked to both effort (measured as the number of calls made) and adaptive selling (adjusting one’s sales approach to fit different customer situations). The desire for money, by contrast, was not significantly linked to either effort or adaptive selling when examined over time. The difference between the two types of motivation was statistically significant; intrinsic motivation had a stronger positive association with both working hard and working smart.
Age played a role as well. The positive link between intrinsic motivation and both effort and adaptive selling was stronger for younger salespeople. This aligns with surveys showing that younger workers prioritize meaningful work. In one national poll cited in the study, 79% of adults aged 18 to 29 agreed that “it is more important to enjoy my job than to make a lot of money.”
When the researchers looked at the full chain from motivation to performance, effort and subsequent sales performance moved together over time. When a salesperson’s effort increased, their performance in the following period tended to increase as well. A separate analysis found that sense of purpose had a direct positive link to salesperson performance, while the other three drivers from Self-Determination Theory did not reach statistical significance on their own.
What this could mean for sales managers
The researchers offered several practical observations. First, they noted that their findings do not suggest compensation is unimportant. Rather, they suggested that pay may function as what psychologist Frederick Herzberg once called a “hygiene factor,” something employees expect and notice mainly when it falls below expectations, but not something that sustainably drives peak performance on its own.
Sales managers often fill team meetings with talk of quotas, quarterly numbers, and forecasts. The study’s findings suggest that spending more time discussing how the company’s products and services benefit customers and society could help stimulate the kind of internal motivation that is linked to sustained effort. Rather than telling a salesperson “the company is counting on you to hit the numbers,” managers might be more effective saying “here is how your work makes a lasting difference for customers.”
This distinction is especially relevant for companies hiring younger salespeople. With millennials and Generation Z making up a growing share of the sales workforce, the study suggests that onboarding and training programs that connect daily selling tasks to a broader societal contribution may help organizations retain and energize their newest employees.
The researchers also pointed out that purpose-driven branding can backfire if it stays at the level of corporate messaging without being translated into individual employees’ understanding of their own impact. A vision statement on a wall is not the same as a salesperson genuinely feeling that their daily calls matter to people.
Important caveats to keep in mind
Several limitations are worth noting. The third study drew its data from a single company in the financial services industry, which may limit how broadly the findings apply to other sectors. The salespeople all worked in a phone-based selling environment, so results might differ for salespeople who meet clients face-to-face or sell in very different markets.
The study did not examine actual changes in financial incentives; it measured salespeople’s desire for money through survey questions rather than manipulating pay structures. A controlled experiment varying both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards could provide stronger evidence about how these motivations interact.
Motivation was also measured at a single point in time via the survey, meaning the study treated it as a relatively stable trait rather than something that might fluctuate day to day. Future research using methods that capture motivation in real time could add nuance to these findings. And while the study found that adaptive selling was linked to intrinsic motivation, the connection between adaptive selling and actual sales performance did not reach statistical significance in this particular dataset, which the researchers noted could be a matter of sample size.
Still, across three studies using different methods and different samples, the pattern held: salespeople appear to want not just a paycheck but a sense that their work matters. For organizations spending heavily on incentive programs while struggling with disengagement, that finding may be worth sitting with.
