Otherwise, that is far to broad a generalisation to be true – well so far as my experiences have shown.

If you put 1 in the numerator and 0 in the denominator you get something more than 10X.

Some surgeons are 10x more effective than others–got a metric other than mortality?

Programming entry requirements have a negative threshold–that was a selling point at one time–yer bookkeeper Griselda can learn RPG in no time.

But you need to spend time in the dog lab if you’re going to be 10X better.

There’s more, but the margin is too narrow. . .

It’s never simple.

It’s never that simple. She’s a personal friend of the unit manager so she could easily convince her that it was not her fault, she has done it many times in the past. She once went 3 years without bringing in a single contract. The sales manager was fired back then but she stayed. She’s also married to the general manager of a competitor and we get a lot of subcontracts from them lately. She’s successfull and makes a lot of money although she’s an incompetent idiot. Happens a lot in sales. Not likely in programming.

If this sales person is incompetent, she should be fired. You, of course, told management about this situation.

If you are required to work for free (14 hour days and weekends) then you should get another job. Your company is cheating you.

The problem you describe is not one of paying sales people for sales but one of ineffective management and enabling support staff.

I’ve been working as an ERP systems consultant for a few years now and I know exactly what I’m talking about because I often do pre-sales work. Whenever a new request for offers comes up I’m asked to estimate the scope of the project and the person-days required. That’s the largest part of the financial proposal. The system I currently work with is the best in the market and everyone knows that. It’s also the most expensive and everyone knows that too, yet it’s so good that it has a market share of about 40% internationally. Not very hard work for our salespersons to convince the customers for our competitive advantage.

Discovering leads and converting them to prospects is indeed a tricky part of the job, but again a salesperson is rarely alone in the task. Managers often play a significant role in creating leads. Also the people who actually do the work and the quality of the final outcome play a much more significant role in turning a new customer into a long term customer that a salesperson ever could. The negotiation is another important job but a bad negotiation may still result in a sale and often does: salespersons are notorious for selling complex projects far too cheap and dumping the responsibility for the forseeable failure to those who were assigned the impossible task of actually completing the work in too short deadlines.

Let me give you an example from my personal experience with an incompetent salesperson. I recently completed a six month project in two months by working weekends and 14 hours/day. I rarely do that anymore because I can estimate and manage my work quite well. The reason I had to do it was that the incompetent salesperson completely failed to realize that the company was a good prospect, although the general manager of that company was a personal friend of the CEO of our company(!). The result was that although the initial contact was made last spring the deal was made in September with no negotiations in between. Additionally, she didn’t ask me when she created the financial offer, resulting in a very low estimation of the overall effort required so I had to do about half the work from home. I managed to do my work and co-ordinate the (small) team into this impossible situation quite well, so well in fact that the project was successful and the financial director of the customer offered me a job (I didn’t take it). The salesperson who didn’t even try for this sale and managed to risk the project with her incompetence will get her commission. She did, after all, bring money to the company.

I find the idea “that most programs of any significance are written by teams” to be arguable. A team of two or three highly talented coders can launch a significant system and often do just that, then teams grow around that effort. I firmly believe a small but highly talented team of 2 or 3 can outperform a much larger team of average coders – superstars don’t just write better code, they see the problem more clearly, they design cleaner solutions, they manage ambiguity in the business gracefully, and they produce new intellectual property for the underlying business as well. It is rare for those latter skills to be fully compensated in a traditional business because it is rare for non-technical managers to comprehend their significance.

I am now writing a trading system by myself. The system suggests trades and it works beautifully – it is used by me and a few other traders and I am certain it outperforms many systems that have been written by large teams (consider how many “quant funds” exploded in 2008). Rather than try to find a firm and become part of a development team, I simply created the asset because I was confident that I could and I love the problem space. For “a coder” like me question of compensation/monetization often comes later.

My first years at IBM (Office Products Division in England) were 100% commission and, boy, it was great!

The productivities of programmers, with this definition of doing the same task for less time, is then a function of his knowledge, experience in the domain, and imagination.

When I studied at university, a group of 3 students do a task, and agree upon a decomposition of the job into 3 perceived to be equal parts (at the time of discussion) Later, one of them found a similar solution in a good book, wrote the code so short (<100 lines) and in 3 days, while the other two had to do somethings like 3000 lines of codes in a week at least. Tell me, who is the better one ?

In the end, it's the awareness of known precedents that counts in programming. You may be a good programmer at producing lines of codes, but that's not the true metric as many have pointed out. It's the solution that counts, and the way and time in which it's implemented.

That may be what you are talking about. I’m talking about measuring sales. Revenue. Dollars coming in the door. A 100% commission sales force is a cost accountant’s dream — all variable. And the best sales people want to be 100% commission because that maximizes their personal revenue.

A salesperson searches for leads; qualifies the leads converting them to prospects; presents the product; manages concerns; justifies the price; makes competitive comparisons; negotiates the price, terms and conditions; asks for the order; closes the sale and finally works to sell additional product to turn the new customer into a long term customer. If this person goes away and is not replaced the sales go away too.

A person who is “tending the phones” is not a sales person. He/She is an order taker.

To the extent possible, I will avoid working for an MBA/public/VC-run company again. My hope is that working for an engineer-owned/run company will be more satisfying.

Consider the following – if you took a “10X sales performer” and replaced that person with a 3X sales performer, would you see an immediate 3.3X drop in revenue?

What about a high sales performer who sells in a difficult line of work, but whose value is entirely incremental to the firm? Vs. another salesperson who is simply “tending the phones” in an established line of work?