Your best salespeople may hear “no” a dozen times before someone says “yes”—and yet thrive. By understanding what keeps them going, you can uncover better ways to lead and motivate them. There’s something about sales that fascinates us. We have to admire the salesperson’s endless resilience in the face of constant rejection, his certainty that things will work out in the end. At the same time, we’re repelled by the job because of what it does to the people in it

As a small-business owner operating two franchise restaurants, I witness firsthand the type of employee dissatisfaction that E.L. Kersten describes in “Why They Call It Work” (The HBR List, February 2006). I agree with Kersten’s assertion that employees need to discard the idea that a job must be meaningful in order for them to find satisfaction with it, but I also believe that employee dissatisfaction arises from three other factors: a lack of self-motivation, a sense of entitlement, and a failure to accept that work is the tool with which one builds a meaningful life

If your salespeople aren't sure who their boss is--the district manager? the regional manager? the customer?--it could be a sign that your company's sales force controls are working at cross-purposes and that your sales function is in trouble