How do you motivate a professional sales force?

What is the best way to get the most out of an indirect medical sales channel?

• We have a third party sales force that sells many products including ours.  I need to increase sales, but I cannot motivate the sales people directly.  How can I get them engaged?

• Answer:

  You need to talk to someone at the top of the partner organization and find out how the way you compensate the company for closed sales stacks up against what your "competitors" pay them. If there is light between that in your disadvantage,here's part of the solution. Secondly, figure out if you can build up a relationship with the company that makes it OK to give individual incentives to sales people. Given the job they have, they are probably highly motivated by individual financial incentives. One of my former business partners would famously started any presentation (another good idea: explain your product to sales agents in a presentation at their office, so they know what they are selling) with writing "YTA" on the whiteboard. He'd then ask if anybody knew what it meant. Often the answer would be no. "Yield To Agent" would be the explanation. And he always made sure it was above what others would pay out for closed sales.