Roughly half of all salespeople miss their annual sales targets. That statistic, cited repeatedly in sales research, represents a staggering amount of lost revenue, strained customer relationships, and managerial headaches. When a salesperson falls short, companies face an uncomfortable choice: fire the underperformer and absorb the steep costs of recruiting and training a replacement, or find a way to get that person back on track.
A study published in the Peer Reviewed Articles collection at ScholarWorks@GVSU set out to examine what actually helps struggling salespeople recover after a poor performance period. The central finding: salespeople who are driven by an internal love of selling bounce back from failure more effectively than those primarily motivated by the promise of financial rewards.
What researchers wanted to know
Valerie Good of Grand Valley State University, along with Douglas E. Hughes of the University of South Florida and Alexander C. LaBrecque of Michigan State University, wanted to understand salesperson resilience and what fuels it. Resilience, as they define it, is “the capacity to overcome or bounce back from adversity, conflict, failure, or other events that induce high levels of stress or pressure.” It is not the same as simple persistence, which means just continuing to try. Resilience also includes learning from mistakes, adapting one’s approach, and emerging from a setback in a stronger position than before.
The team identified two specific gaps in the existing research. First, while scholars had studied financial incentives like bonuses and contests as tools to push underperforming salespeople, little work had explored the role that a salesperson’s personal characteristics, specifically resilience, play in recovering from failure. Second, the researchers wanted to pinpoint what type of motivation is more closely linked to resilience: intrinsic motivation, which is the inner desire to do the work itself, or extrinsic motivation, which in this study specifically referred to being driven by financial compensation.
How the study was designed
The research team partnered with a large, nationally recognized U.S. sales firm based in the Midwest. This company operates as a call center where all sales transactions happen over the phone. At this firm, any salesperson who falls below 70% of their monthly sales quota receives a formal performance review warning letter that threatens repercussions.
The researchers collected survey responses from 110 salespeople in one division of the company, all of whom had received such a warning letter. The survey measured each salesperson’s level of resilience using a validated four-item scale with statements like “I tend to bounce back after hardships” and “I can deal with whatever comes.” It also measured intrinsic motivation with items such as “I don’t need a reason to sell; I sell because I want to,” and extrinsic motivation with items like “I sell because I get paid to sell.”
What made this study distinctive was that the researchers did not rely solely on self-reported performance data. The company provided objective records tracked by its internal software. For each salesperson, the firm shared data from the month before and the month after the warning letter was sent. This data included the number of outbound calls each salesperson initiated, the average duration of those calls, the salesperson’s assigned sales quota, and their actual performance expressed as a percentage of that quota.
To analyze the data, the team used a statistical technique called first differencing. In plain terms, this approach compares each salesperson’s numbers before and after the warning letter, effectively removing stable personal characteristics that do not change over time. This allowed the researchers to focus on what actually changed in each salesperson’s behavior and results after receiving the warning.
What the numbers revealed
The results followed a clear chain of events. Salespeople who scored higher on the resilience scale showed a significant positive change in performance after receiving their warning letter. But the study went further by examining how that performance improvement happened.
Resilient salespeople increased both the number of calls they made and the average length of those calls in the month following their warning. The increase in calls represents working harder by reaching out to more customers. The increase in average call duration suggests something different: it indicates the salesperson was spending more time with each customer, which typically involves asking more questions, uncovering customer needs, addressing objections, and working toward a sale. In other words, it points toward a more strategic and engaged selling approach.
Both of these effort changes were linked to improved performance. The statistical analysis showed that the relationship between resilience and better performance was partially explained by these increases in effort. The researchers used a bootstrapping method with 10,000 samples, a technique that repeatedly resamples the data to produce more reliable estimates of indirect relationships. This analysis confirmed that the link from resilience to the change in number of calls to improved performance was statistically significant. The same was true for the link from resilience to the change in average call duration to improved performance.
Perhaps the most striking finding concerned what type of motivation was associated with resilience. Intrinsic motivation, the inner drive to sell for the satisfaction it brings, was strongly and positively linked to resilience. By contrast, the compensation-seeking aspect of extrinsic motivation, working primarily because of the paycheck, was negatively linked to resilience. The difference between the two was statistically significant. In simple terms, salespeople who were in it for the love of the work were far more likely to bounce back from a poor month than those who were in it primarily for the money.
The researchers also provided a visual comparison of high-resilience and low-resilience salespeople. Before the warning letter, both groups showed similar patterns of declining performance. After the letter, the two groups diverged sharply. High-resilience salespeople increased their calls, spent more time per call, and improved their percentage of goal achievement. Low-resilience salespeople did not show these positive changes.
What this means for sales managers
The findings carry several practical implications for people who manage sales teams. The most direct takeaway is that resilience appears to be a meaningful factor in whether a struggling salesperson will recover after receiving a performance warning. Managers might consider assessing resilience during the hiring process or through coaching conversations to better understand which salespeople are likely to respond productively to corrective feedback.
The study also suggests that the standard playbook of dangling financial incentives in front of underperformers may not be the most effective approach when a salesperson is already in a failure mindset. If a salesperson has repeatedly missed targets and watched bonus opportunities pass them by, the promise of more money may feel out of reach rather than motivating. Instead, the findings point toward investing in intrinsic motivators. According to a framework in psychology called Self-Determination Theory, intrinsic motivation grows when people feel they have autonomy, or control over their work; competence, or confidence in their abilities; and relatedness, or a sense of connection and belonging with their team.
For managers, this could translate into practical actions: providing training that builds a salesperson’s confidence, fostering a team culture that emphasizes support and camaraderie, and giving salespeople more freedom in how they approach their work rather than tightening managerial control during difficult periods.
One important caveat from the study itself: the researchers did not have access to the actual content of the phone calls. They could see that resilient salespeople had longer conversations with customers, but they could not confirm exactly what those salespeople were saying or doing differently during those calls. The longer call duration is consistent with a more strategic and adaptive selling approach, but the study cannot definitively prove that is what occurred.
Limitations to keep in mind
The data came from a single division of a single company, and all sales in this context were conducted over the phone. Results might differ in industries where sales happen face-to-face, where sales cycles are longer, or where the product being sold is more complex. The 23% survey response rate, while within the range considered acceptable in sales research, means that the majority of salespeople who received warning letters did not participate. It is possible that those who chose to respond differ in meaningful ways from those who did not.
The study also examined only one month before and one month after the warning letter. Whether the performance improvements among resilient salespeople persist over longer time periods remains an open question. And because this was not a randomized experiment, the study identifies associations between resilience, effort, and performance rather than proving that resilience directly causes better outcomes.
Still, the pattern of results presents a coherent picture: salespeople who possess the inner psychological capacity to recover from setbacks, and who are motivated by more than just a paycheck, appear better equipped to turn a bad month into a better one. For organizations spending significant resources on sales force management, that is a pattern worth paying attention to.
