One of the ways you know if you're really practicing this is if you actively disqualify potential customers after the first call.
Not them disqualifying you, but you actively saying, "Hey, not sure we are the right solution for you. Seems like you're trying to achieve X, but we're really better fit if you're trying to achieve Y."
This is in lieu of trying to convince them that you're a good fit for X, or that they should actually really be wanting to achieve Y.
Quick disqualification is sort of a counter-intuitive idea for a lot of throughput maximizing engineers. Shouldn't we want to optimize every lead?
Perhaps, but I think the better frame is optimizing productive seller-minutes. And time spent on deals that should die (and probably will die, eventually) is definitely not optimized.
That’s antithetical to “this period’s bonus.” Who cares if it dies in three months when the bonus for that three months end up in the salesman’s pocket?
You can’t make sales people responsible for the entire company, that’s CEO- and board-level responsibility.
If you don’t give sales bonus for clients that later canceled due to engineering or tech support fuck up, do you expect regular sales people also to do engineering and tech support management in your company?
It is only a counterpoint if you claim that this compensation scheme works well. If you don't think it makes sense, then it actually proves my point that bonuses should only involve things that directly depend on employee's own performance.
Is it fair for the company to have received three months of payments from a customer but the salesperson doesn’t get commission at all? How will you retain sales staff when word gets out? What’s the period length over which if the deal dies the salesperson doesn’t get their commission? Do you roll back commission payments later when the customer stops paying?
These are all great questions which people have answered and it’s the standard solution to the problem of misaligned incentives between the company receiving recurring revenue and the sales person receiving an upfront commission.
It's optimized for the seller. The sales person that can actually determine good fit/bad fit can't also be making 100 calls a day. The BDR making 100 calls a day cannot determine good fit/bad fit on their own on the first call.
Not them disqualifying you, but you actively saying, "Hey, not sure we are the right solution for you. Seems like you're trying to achieve X, but we're really better fit if you're trying to achieve Y."
This is in lieu of trying to convince them that you're a good fit for X, or that they should actually really be wanting to achieve Y.
Quick disqualification is sort of a counter-intuitive idea for a lot of throughput maximizing engineers. Shouldn't we want to optimize every lead?
Perhaps, but I think the better frame is optimizing productive seller-minutes. And time spent on deals that should die (and probably will die, eventually) is definitely not optimized.