This post is a reply to a Twitter thread where Brett Nordquist was kind enough to weigh in on my post here titled A Sales Epiphany Strikes at #1 Microsoft Way.
My initial replies are below.
Pressed for time, I couldn’t reply to the other questions at the time and I will do so now.
First off, any sales position that is financially incentivized always puts the interests of the salesperson or their parent company first.
Secondly, while the nomenclature may differ depending on the company or the position of the salesperson, a sales commission is a glorified spiff.
Thirdly, I am in agreement with keeping the best interest of the customer in mind always.
Fourthly, spiffs are not short cuts. They are product-specific commissions. Every product sold by a dedicated sales team is incentivized by someone or something. Whenever there is a focus on a product or brand, even if commissions are paid out through a pool or salaries, people have been incentivized to choose the more lucrative product to sell.
Five, unless there is very visible and blatant deception, everyone, yes everyone, who buys certain classes of products expect the salesperson to make a living, and agree to be sold on the best product for them that they can afford.
Finally, Apple wouldn’t be the recipient of the erosion of trust at carrier stores. The cheapo manufacturers would be. No one – especially the cognoscenti – who looks at Apple as a premium brand cares jack at what happens at carrier stores, for they would have gone into the Apple stores to get their fill form the so-called geniuses. No, the recipient of such a lack of trust would be the bottom-feeding hardware OEMs who tend to create product for the proletariat, and can never seem to gain mindshare. I’m talking about the Pantechs of the world here.
Coming back, if it wasn’t for spiffs, either personal –as spiffs or corporate – as favorable pricing, rebates, etc., why do think that some decidedly superior products don’t get traction with the salesdrones on the sales floor?
The Zune was and still is a superior product to the iPod, but it flamed out. Even if you put the mostly non-existent and subsequently incredibly inept marketing aside, why didn’t it? It had superior specs and better performance. And a lovely brown color option.
Or take Windows Phone 7. Why on God’s Earth would someone take an Android phone, any Android phone – FOR GOODNESS SAKES! – over a Windows Phone? Did we teleport into Htrae?
Commissions matter, and are good. The salesdrones just have to be trained, as you correctly point out, to always take the customers’ requirements and desires into consideration. Before the salesdroids’ greed.
I enjoy the privilege of running a service company today, one where no one is incentivized to perform any sales of any sort, be it software, hardware, or services. Our focus is on customer service, since nothing we do is rocket science, and can be easily replicated. Their incentives are based on customer service and that alone.
However, for a stretch in 1990-1991 during a rough period in the gestational period of what eventually is now Logikworx, I was a salesman for a technology company in California. I am proud to say that I can look back and say without fear of contradiction that I was motivated by one thing: the top sales position. Not individual spiffs, which I considered quite infra dig.
Then again, I had the luxury of owning a nascent consulting company here in the US and family businesses in Nigeria to fall back upon. Most salespeople don’t have that.
