I linked Joel Spolsky’s blog some time ago (Friday Link #9 – Joel on Software), and today’s link is from the blog of Fog Creek Software, a company he founded.
Fog Creek has recently abandoned the Commission Based Sales model, and this blog explains why, starting with the question Why do we pay sales commissions? and coming up with the answer that there are better ways of remunerating the sales team – at least for Fog Creek!
For most technolpogy companies sales commissions are standard practice, so it’s great to see a post looking at alternative ways of approaching the problem!
Comments
The most important concept in that Fog Creek post is “Why would you want a system that sets up after-sales service as competition against new sales, especially if you have a small sales team? Reputation and retention, after all, are both paths to revenue”
This is also relevant to technical support teams; at Chernikeeff (purchased by Dimension Data), we kept a single technical team who worked on both pre and post sales support; people were much more inclined to design something reliable if they were also going to have to fix it if it failed. We cared about reputation, and operating this way led to repeat, lower effort, sales.