Sales professionals who are worth their weight in gold understand something that others do not.  There is an inner-game of selling that they play with reckless abandon and a consistency that would baffle the experts.

What they do is ignore the sales results of their fellow team members.  They do not attempt to compete with them.  If there is a sales contest and the rep in question is in second place, she does not try any harder to win the contest for the simple reason that she is wholly uninterested in what the leader of that contest is up to. Instead, she competes with herself.

One way she does this is to set what are called self-rewards.  She knows what number she needs to hit that week, or month or quarter, or whatever the time-frame is, and if she hits that number, she knows in advance what her sales commission will consist of.

Then she takes a reasonable percentage of that sales commission, and she decides to allocate that dollar amount towards a reward that will motivate her to stay focused and on task for the entire time period in question.

Setting self-rewards is simple.  All you need to do is make a quick list of things that would motivate you to acquire.  They could be as simple as going out for gourmet ice cream, a new set of cuff-links, dinner at an expensive restaurant, or anything else that might galvanize you to take actions you might not otherwise take.

The benefit to self-rewards is that they enable you to avoid being sucked into distractions – something that plagues most all of us.