Get Me Someone Who Can Sell · Edition 2 · Published by Revenue Hire · April 21, 2026
The short version: Quota and kickoff speeches don’t keep a rep producing. Their own reason does. Ben Slaughter, Director of Sales at Covideo, says “I can’t motivate people,” so instead he asks every new hire one question: what are you actually working toward? Then he ties every one-on-one back to it. The data backs this up. Objective Management Group has assessed 2 million-plus salespeople, and motivation is the single biggest separator between elite and average reps. Most top performers are driven by something deeper than money. If you’ve been hiring for money motivation, you’ve been hiring against the data.
Early in my career I was in my twenties, managing people older than me. There was a conversation I couldn’t bring myself to have.
I couldn’t ask what was actually going on in their lives. What they were working toward. What mattered to them outside of work. It felt too personal. Like I was crossing a line.
Then I went through Sandler training, and they walked me straight into that conversation. First time I tried it, I was literally thinking, “oh my gosh, I’m asking them to tell me something personal.” It felt awkward. I had a lot of head trash to work through on it.
But I learned. And once I started having that conversation, I saw what I’d been missing.
Last week I had Ben Slaughter on the show, and he said four words that brought me right back to that moment. Ben is Director of Sales at Covideo. I asked him how he motivates his team.
“I can’t motivate people.”
Sounds counterintuitive, right? Then he walked me through what he does instead. What he described was a system. That system is what I want to give you today.
Why I’m leading with this
If you’re hiring a salesperson this year, motivation is the hidden variable between the rep still producing a year from now and the one who has gone flat.
It starts at the interview. You surface it at hire. You protect it with a system once they’re in the seat. Skip either and you hired a retention problem you haven’t felt yet.
This edition covers both halves.
Here’s what Ben meant
Quota doesn’t motivate for long. Kickoff speeches don’t survive Tuesday. Four hangups in, the amp is dead.
What keeps a rep going is their own reason. Ben calls it “the carrot behind the result.” So he stopped trying to generate the motivation. He made the rep the source.
Ben’s playbook
Every new hire has a day-two sit-down with Ben. Not metrics. Not expectations. Those are covered elsewhere. The conversation is one question.
“What are you actually working for?”
Not quota. Not the earning target. The money is going toward what?
One rep is saving for a down payment on a house. One wants to buy a ring. One wants to take his family on a vacation by a specific date.
Then every one-on-one ties back. “Looks like we’re on track for the down payment.” Or, “We’re not on track for the ring. What are we changing?”
It’s personal. It’s specific. It survives Monday morning because the rep said it out loud. Ben is just reminding them. And when they hit it, the celebration is bigger. The whole team has been in the conversation the whole way. The win is shared, not just a line on a dashboard.
If you have a sales team already, run this play this week
Block an hour with each rep. Not a performance review. A check-in.
Ask one question. “What are you actually working toward?” Give them space. Expect some fumbling. That itself is information.
Write down what they say. Bring it back in every one-on-one from here on. When they hit, connect it to their goal. When they miss, same. The conversation becomes the loop, not the pep talk.
If you’re hiring salespeople, here’s the other side
Ask in the interview:
- “What does the money get you?”
- “What’s a goal you’re working toward this year that isn’t a company goal?”
- “What drives you when you’re having a bad week?”
Listen for specifics. Numbers, names, dates, purchases. “I’m saving for a house by October.” “I want to take my kids to Italy next summer.”
Two kinds of salespeople. Both count. One performs better.
Internally driven: family, craft, meaning, what they’re building at home.
Externally driven: money, recognition, the leaderboard, the trip.
Objective Management Group runs the biggest sales-assessment database in the industry, with more than 2 million salespeople evaluated. Two findings worth your attention:
One: motivation is the single biggest separator between elite and average salespeople. The top 10% score 84% on Motivation. The average rep scores 63%. The bottom 10% scores 41%.
Two: most salespeople are intrinsically motivated. Only about a quarter are primarily motivated by money. And intrinsic drive is especially consistent in longer, more complex B2B sales cycles, which is exactly where most of our clients live.
If you’ve been hiring for money motivation because that’s what “real” salespeople run on, you’ve been hiring against the data. The rep still producing consistently in a complex sale is usually running on something deeper than commission.
Most of us in sales still run the older assumption. Good salesperson equals money-motivated. The data says that assumption is backwards. The candidates most likely to become your top performers are driven by mastery, personal goals, what they’re building at home. Not the ones who light up only at the comp plan.
That’s how you miss the best hires. Not the candidates who can’t answer the motivation question. The ones who answer with something that isn’t money.
Your job in the interview is to find out which kind is in front of you, and whether they can name what drives them at all.
- Red flag: generic answers. “I want to grow.” “I’m driven by success.” “I like winning.” Sales training, not goals.
- Bigger red flag: no answer at all. If they can’t articulate what drives them, they don’t know themselves yet. And you can’t manufacture someone else’s reason when the quarter gets ugly.
If they CAN answer clearly, you just learned more about managing them than any reference check will tell you.
The reframe
Tony Robbins doesn’t survive Tuesday. Alec Baldwin yelling “coffee is for closers” doesn’t survive Tuesday. No amount of hype does.
Motivation is not what you generate. It is what you surface.
I learned a long time ago to ask the personal question. What Ben gave me is a system around it. Most of us know we should ask. We just haven’t built the system. Ben did. Steal it.
The full episode with Ben is on YouTube. The show exists to show you what great sales talent and leadership looks like in practice, so you can spot it when you’re hiring. Ben is this week’s case study.
One more ask. If you know a CEO or sales leader who’s hiring this year and still runs the money-motivated filter, forward this to them. It could save them a year and a bad hire.
Let’s find them,
Olga Pechnenko
Founder, Revenue Hire
Host, Get Me Someone Who Can Sell
P.S. When was the last time you sat down with a rep and asked what they were actually working for? If you do it this week, reply and tell me what you heard.
Get Me Someone Who Can Sell is the Revenue Hire newsletter. Read more editions, or see how Revenue Hire helps you hire salespeople who actually sell.