Determinants of Sales Force Performance: The Role of Business Motivation, Communication Skills, and Compensation at PT ABCD in Medan, Indonesia

This study investigates how business motivation, communication skills, and compensation shape the performance of the sales force at PT ABCD, a spare-parts distribution company operating in Medan, Indonesia. The research was prompted by the firm’s ongoing difficulty in reaching its sales targets during a period of contraction in the regional automotive market. Against a monthly target of IDR 380 million, the team realized only about IDR 200 million on average. A quantitative associative design was adopted. Data were gathered from all thirty members of the sales team through a saturated (census) sampling technique using a Likert- scale questionnaire,  and were processed with  Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS 4. The analysis shows that business motivation has a positive but statistically insignificant effect on sales performance, whereas communication skills and compensation each have a positive and significant effect. Communication skills proved to be the strongest predictor. Taken together, the three factors account for 84.9 percent of the variation in sales performance. The results indicate that, in a field-based distribution business, a salesperson’s ability to communicate clearly with customers and the presence of a fair compensation scheme weigh more heavily on measurable outcomes than internal drive alone. Future studies are encouraged to add external variables, such as consumer purchasing power, inflation, or market competition, in order to obtain a fuller account of the forces that influence sales performance.