That’s antithetical to “this period’s bonus.” Who cares if it dies in three months when the bonus for that three months end up in the salesman’s pocket?
You can’t make sales people responsible for the entire company, that’s CEO- and board-level responsibility.
If you don’t give sales bonus for clients that later canceled due to engineering or tech support fuck up, do you expect regular sales people also to do engineering and tech support management in your company?
It is only a counterpoint if you claim that this compensation scheme works well. If you don't think it makes sense, then it actually proves my point that bonuses should only involve things that directly depend on employee's own performance.
Is it fair for the company to have received three months of payments from a customer but the salesperson doesn’t get commission at all? How will you retain sales staff when word gets out? What’s the period length over which if the deal dies the salesperson doesn’t get their commission? Do you roll back commission payments later when the customer stops paying?
These are all great questions which people have answered and it’s the standard solution to the problem of misaligned incentives between the company receiving recurring revenue and the sales person receiving an upfront commission.
Also: “Coffee is for closers”