Salespeople Behaving Better

The Shift in How We Manage Sellers

For decades, sales leaders have reached for the same lever to shape behaviour: money. Pay people for results, and results follow. But the headlines tell a darker story—high-pressure tactics, misleading pitches, even fraud. When you pay sales, you often get the sale and sometimes more than you bargained for. However, managers have another tool at their disposal just as powerful – their performance measurement system.

What the Data Shows

A survey of 207 business-to-business salespeople indicated that when companies track a broader set of performance measures, including activities, capabilities, and customer outcomes, in addition to traditional financial measures, they actually get more customer-oriented salespeople. Equally striking is what didn’t matter. Variable pay—commission—showed no statistically significant link to customer-oriented behaviour in this study. The financial lever everyone obsesses over moved the needle less than the measurement scorecard most leaders treat as an afterthought.

Customer orientation is the marketing concept focused on the single customer. In a sales role, it means being prepared to forgo short-term self-serving rewards, such as an immediate commission, to do what's right for the customer. Given this definition, it is easy to understand how performance, when evaluated strictly by revenue-to-quota, would negatively impact a salesperson’s level of customer orientation.  

People focus their limited attention on whatever the organization signals is important. Measure only financial results, and salespeople fixate on the short-term sale. A salesperson judged purely on numbers won’t mentor a colleague or invest in a customer relationship that pays off next year—because none of that shows up on the scorecard.

A diverse scorecard defuses tunnel vision. The study tracked 26 measures across eight categories: revenue, account management, customer outcomes, activity, knowledge, skills, traits, and expense management. The more categories used to assess performance, the stronger the pull toward customer-first selling.

Where It Matters Most… Simple Sales

Here is where it gets practical. The measurement effect is strongest in low-complexity, transactional selling—quick, high-volume deals.

Why? In complex, solution-based sales, reps already have to understand customer needs deeply; customer orientation is baked into the job. But in transactional environments, the path of least resistance is to push product and move on. That’s exactly where a thoughtful scorecard does its heaviest lifting. The takeaway is blunt: if your sellers handle simple, repeatable deals, your measurement design matters more, not less.

What Sales Leaders Should Do

• Broaden your scorecard. Don’t evaluate sellers on financial results alone. Add non-financial measures across multiple categories—customer satisfaction, retention, listening, product knowledge, planning. The added bonus? Your sales managers will have a cache of rich information to engage in highly productive sales coaching.
• Don’t just bolt on one customer metric. Adding “customer satisfaction” on its own won’t do it. Even when all customer-specific measures were removed from the study – a broader set of measures still raised customer orientation levels.
• Treat measurement and pay as separate tools. You can redesign how you evaluate performance without touching commission structures. The scorecard is the underused lever.
• Pay closest attention to transactional teams. That’s where diverse measurement delivers the biggest behavioural gain.
• Use measures as a coaching tool. Non-financial data tells you why results happen, opening the door to better coaching conversations—not just verdicts.

Bottom Line

What you measure tells your people what you value—and they will deliver exactly that. If you want salespeople who serve customers instead of just closing them, stop assuming the commission plan does all the work. Fix the scorecard first.