Updated: January 05, 2023

75 Best Motivational Sales Quotes for Work in 2023

Here is our list of motivating sales quotes to boost performance.

Sales quotes are motivational quotes from some of our greatest thinkers throughout history that will motivate your team to stay positive! The grind can wear on even the greatest of your team members, and these quotes will help to keep morale going strong. One of the most famous examples of one is commonly quoted from Thomas Edison – “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” The purpose of these sayings is to inspire and motivate your team to stay on top of their game and keep their eye on the prize!

These sayings are examples of motivational work quotes. These sentiments also work as sales meeting ideas, virtual sales kickoff ideas, and elements of sales games.

This list includes:

  • inspirational sales quotes
  • competitive sales quotes
  • sales one-liners
  • funny sales quotes
  • positive quotes for sales teams
  • motivational quotes for sales teams
  • sales quotes about confidence
  • sales quotes about customers
  • sales quotes of the day

Let’s get started!

Inspirational sales quotes

  1. “If you are working on something that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.” – Steve Jobs
  2. “The ordinary focus on what they’re getting. The extraordinary think about who they’re becoming.” – Unknown
  3. “Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.” – Og Mandino
  4. “Never ever chase money. You should chase success, because with success money follows.” – Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones
  5. “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” – Andy Warhol
  6. “Ninety percent of selling is conviction, and 10 per cent is persuasion.” – Shiv Khera
  7. “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan
  8. “You learn more from losing than winning. You learn how to keep going.” – Morgan Wootten

Competitive sales quotes

  1. “True nobility is being superior to your former self.” – Ernest Hemingway
  2. “What you lack in talent can be made up with desire, hustle, and giving 110% all the time.” – Don Zimmer
  3. “You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.” – Walt Disney
  4. “The greatest only become the greatest because they are willing to expose themselves to people who can help them become better. Your goal is to find those around who can and will do just that for you.” – Mark Hunter, sales speaker and trainer, The Sales Hunter
  5. “Leadership belongs to those who take it.” – Sheryl Sandberg
  6. “Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.” – Vince Lombardi
  7. “Not everyone gets to be a winner unless they choose to be. Winning is a mentality.” – Valentin Chmerkovskiy
  8. “A champion is someone who gets up when he can’t.” – Jack Dempsey
  9. “Competition is the best form of motivation.” – Cordae
  10. “The rivalry is with ourself. I try to be better than is possible. I fight against myself, not against the other.” – Luciano Pavarotti

Sales one-liners

  1. “I never lose. I either win or learn.” – Nelson Mandela
  2. “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” – Mark Twain
  3. “How you sell is more important than what you sell.” – Andy Paul
  4. “You don’t have to be liked to be trusted.” – Keenan
  5. “Change before you have to.” – Jack Welch
  6. “Selling is essentially a transfer of feelings.” – Zig Ziglar
  7. “Everyone lives by selling something.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
  8. “Selling is helping people to do what they’re already inclined to do.” – Daniel H. Pink

Funny sales quotes

  1. “A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.” – William Shakespeare
  2. “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” – Abraham Lincoln
  3. “I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.” – Gustav Mahler
  4. My sales objective is to get my prospects to look at my products the same way I look at bacon. – Kurt Mortensen
  5. “Customers are like teeth. Ignore them and they’ll go away.” – Jerry Flanagan
  6. “Junk is the ideal product… the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.” – William S. Burroughs
  7. “Remember, you only have to succeed the last time.” – Brian Tracy

Positive quotes for sales teams

  1. “Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you’ll start having positive results.” – Willie Nelson
  2. “True productivity comes from allowing yourself to make mistakes. Do so, and you’ll succeed more often than any ten perfectionists.”  – Laura Stack
  3. “Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.” – Zig Ziglar
  4. “When you undervalue what you do, the world will undervalue who you are.” – Oprah Winfrey
  5. “You can’t just sit there and wait for people to give you that golden dream. You’ve got to get out there and make it happen for yourself.” – Diana Ross
  6. “I like to think of sales as the ability to gracefully persuade, not manipulate, a person or persons into a win-win situation.” – Bo Bennett
  7. “Winning is only half of it. Having fun is the other half.” – Bum Phillips

Motivational quotes for sales teams

  1. “Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.” – John Wooden
  2. “Establishing trust is better than any sales technique.” – Mike Puglia
  3. “To be seen as a credible and trusted advisor, every touch you have with a customer should provide added value.” – Sharon Gillenwater
  4. “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”  – Walt Disney
  5. “Motivation will almost always beat mere talent.” – Norman Ralph Augustine
  6. “Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other.” – Walter Elliot
  7. “An objection is not a rejection; it is simply a request for more information.” – Bo Bennett
  8. “I take rejection as someone blowing a bugle in my ear to wake me up and get going, rather than retreat.” – Sylvester Stallone

Sales quotes about confidence

  1. “Don’t bother telling the world you are ready. Show it. Do it.” – Peter Dinklage
  2. “Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.” – Og Mandino
  3. “Knowing what must be done does away with fear.” – Rosa Parks
  4. “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” – Alice Walker
  5. “If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.” – Erica Jong
  6. As long as you keep going, you’ll keep getting better. And as you get better, you gain more confidence. That alone is success.” – Tamara Taylor
  7. “I have always said that everyone is in sales. Maybe you don’t hold the title of salesperson, but if the business you are in requires you to deal with people, you, my friend, are in sales.” – Zig Ziglar
  8. “Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’ Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life.” – Mary Kay Ash
  9. “Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.” – Norman Vincent Peale
  10. “When you have confidence, you can have a lot of fun. And when you have fun, you can do amazing things.” – Joe Namath

Sales quotes about customers

  1. “Today, the salesperson isn’t the sole conduit of information to the firms.  If the buyer has a poor experience with a seller, they’ll simply move onto the next channel.”  – Mary Shea
  2. “Solve customer problems and make sure that the customer is representative of a large market and then you will have a pretty good formula.” – Melanie Perkins
  3. “Success isn’t about how much money you make; it’s about the difference you make in people’s lives.” – Michelle Obama
  4. “If you want to make money, you have to help someone else make money.” – Russell Simmons
  5. “No matter how many customers you have, each is an individual. The day you start thinking of them as this amorphous ‘collection’ and stop thinking of them as people is the day you start going out of business.” – Dharmesh Shah
  6. “Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman – not the attitude of the prospect.” – W. Clement Stone
  7. “In sales, it’s not what you say; it’s how they perceive what you say.” – Jeffrey Gitomer
  8. “It ought to be self-evident common sense that service is important to sales. But it’s not.” – Stanley Marcus
  9. “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” – Michael LeBoeuf

Sales quotes of the day

  1. “Do not focus on numbers. Focus on doing what you do best.” – Cassey Ho
  2. “Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.” – Tony Robbins
  3. Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going. – Sam Levenson
  4. “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Wishing is not enough; we must do.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
  5. “If we are going to be part of the solution, we have to engage the problems.” – Majora Carter
  6. “One of the best predictors of ultimate success in either sales or non-sales selling isn’t natural talent or even industry expertise, but how you explain your failures and rejections.” – Daniel H. Pink
  7. “There’s no lotion or potion that will make sales faster and easier for you – unless your potion is hard work.” – Jeffrey Gitomer
  8. “In sales, a referral is the key to the door of resistance.” – Bo Bennett

Final Thoughts

Sometimes it is hard to find the words to motivate us to move forward and succeed at the highest level. Thankfully, there are hundreds of brilliant minds that have come before us that can help! All of these quotes will do wonders for uplifting and empowering your team to make their most lofty goals a reality!

Next, check out this list of sales books and sales conferences.

FAQ: Sales quotes

Here are answers to questions about sales quotes.

What are sales quotes?

Sales quotes are direct quotes from some of the greatest thinkers of human history that can help inspire us to persevere and excel in our work here and now in the present.

What are some good quotes to inspire sales teams?

Some good quotes to inspire sales teams include:

  • “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney
  • “Establishing trust is better than any sales technique.” – Mike Puglia
  • “How you sell is more important than what you sell.” – Andy Paul

These sayings drill into the most important elements of selling and advocate for authenticity and skill above cheap tricks.

How do you use quotes to motivate sales teams?

You can use quotes to motivate sales teams by having a quote-of-the-day post either in an email blast or the work chat. Sales quotes are also an excellent way to kick off a meeting if you find a particular quote that applies directly to the topics you’ll be discussing.

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People & Culture Director at teambuilding.com.
Grace is the Director of People & Culture at TeamBuilding. She studied Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, Information Science at East China Normal University and earned an MBA at Washington State University.

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