[WhitneyLand]

The short answer is it turns out to be a hard thing to do.

Right off the bat your choices are limited because many sales roles benefit from being close to customers. You may be limited to local and have no option to leverage hundreds of millions of people outside the country like tech can.

Secondly, they're expensive. The stars can make double what a top architect makes. You might think, no problem it's just x% on what they sell and we all benefit. Then the problem becomes why should they join your company now if you don't already have a lucrative pipeline to maintain and expand? To get around this some companies will pay fixed cash rate until commissions ramp up, but often that's hard to do for a startup.

Also salespeople tend to care less about how cool the technology is. It does matter somewhat, it's better to be selling software than cigarettes. However it would be common for a tech star to turn down a cobol job even for a 30% raise, whereas I estimate that's less true on the sales side.