A while back I wanted to become a customer of a company I had formerly worked at. I reached out via an executive-level friend and former co-worker who made a warm intro to sales. And STILL they first scheduled a call with a brand new to the job BDR who knew less about the product than I did. Not that person's fault, and I felt bad for them, but it was a complete waste of everyone's time.
Sadly that's how incentives works in modern sales orgs – BDRs get paid on the number of calls they convert to the next stage and you were a guaranteed conversion since you already knew and wanted to buy the product.
So that’s a problem with how the incentives are set up I’d say. Not the BDR’s or their manager’s fault, rather a high level incentive problem which should be fixed.
What’s HN’s opinion on sales commissions anyway? I always thought that research showed that any job that requires creative thinking doesn’t make people work harder if they are compensated based on bonuses / commissions.
Have any large organizations ever experimented with getting rid of the whole commission based compensation for sales? If so, how did it work out?
I think at least from sales orgs, bonuses are very easy to justify. Sales orgs are very data-driven – typically their CRMs measure everything from the time it took to close a deal to how much each rep brought in a quarter. If just paying a regular salary worked to motivate reps enough, you'd find lots of companies doing that, but they're pretty rare.
