[marktangotango]

I have observed this myself. At one company I worked at, with about $50M in annual sales, the 'top sales' award was fiercely competed between two guys who'd each got about $10M in sales for the year. I don't know what the commission structure was, but at 10% that's $1M.

Those two were a breed apart however. They could talk to anyone, everyone liked them. They could work product and project mgmt teams to get just enough done to make the deal. The product at the time was a bit of dog too. I don't know how they did it, One thing I observed was; they seemed to have deep contacts in the companies they were selling to. How they developed these networks, I don't know. I think that is the "secret sauce" so to speak.

[tootall]

But you don't always need to build a network yourself: in my experience, if you're reasonably bright from the technical point of view, you get paired with a sales account manager who will chase the deals for you, so you just show up, take care of the (relative simple) technical bits, and get your commission. He will do everything else.

[marktangotango]

Ah ok, I missed you were specifically talking about sales engineering, my mistake.