November 19, 2024
I had a sales rep named Bill. In 2017, he sold $7 million worth of HVAC. He was the best salesperson I had. And he was in my office constantly asking for more leads.
He was making $700,000 a year in personal income. The average household income in our market was around $60,000. This man was earning more than eleven times the median household income in the area, and he still wanted more. Every week. Without fail.
I’m going to be honest — there were moments when I felt like it was a bottomless pit. Is it never enough? Does he not realize how much he’s making? Is he just being greedy?
Those are the wrong questions. I was thinking about it completely wrong.
I remembered something from a college textbook — Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The basic idea is that human motivation isn’t one-dimensional. People aren’t just driven by money. They’re driven by a layered set of needs: survival first, then security, then belonging, then recognition, and finally growth and purpose. Once a lower need is met, it stops being a motivator and a higher need takes over.
Bill wasn’t coming into my office because he needed more money. He was making more money than he’d ever dreamed of. He was coming into my office because something else wasn’t being met — and the only way he knew how to express it was to ask for more leads.
I took a guess. What if he needed to feel like he belonged to something? What if he wanted to feel like he was part of the leadership conversation, not just a guy in the field producing revenue?
I set up a recurring lunch — Bill, me, and the general manager. Once a week at first, then once a month. At our first lunch, he didn’t ask for more leads once. He talked about his kids. He talked about the technicians and how they were feeling. He shared ideas about team culture. He was engaged in a way I had never seen in my office.
He stopped asking for more leads after that. Not because his commission changed. Because I had finally met the actual need.
This is what most business owners miss about Maslow: you cannot motivate someone operating at one level of the hierarchy by offering a reward that sits at a different level. If your green tech is struggling to pay rent, a leadership title won’t motivate him. If your senior tech is craving recognition, a $200 spiff won’t move him. If your best salesperson wants to belong to the leadership team, throwing more leads at him just gives him more revenue without addressing what’s actually missing.
The lesson isn’t that money doesn’t matter. At the foundational level, it absolutely does. If you’re not paying people enough to live on, nothing else works. But once that base is covered, money becomes a progressively less efficient tool for driving performance — and an enormously expensive way to make people feel recognized.
A lunch once a month costs almost nothing. A raise that temporarily makes someone feel recognized costs a fortune and has to be repeated every few months when the feeling fades.
Pay attention to what your people are actually asking for underneath the ask. When someone says they want more leads, or a higher commission, or a bigger bonus — ask yourself what need they’re really expressing. The answer will tell you more about how to keep them performing at a high level than any spreadsheet ever will.