[jamesdhutton]

As others here have noted, the challenge with paying salespeople to close the deal is that you create perverse incentives. In enterprise software sales, the salesperson has every incentive to make impossible-to-keep promises about what the software can do. After closing the deal, the salesperson hands over to an implementation team, who try and fail to make the software do what the salesperson promised it would. The result is a failed implementation and an unhappy customer. I have often thought it would make sense to pay salespeople for a successful implementation of software, not just for the initial sale. I’ve never seen that done though. Would be curious to hear if anyone has successfully dealt with this challenge.