I forget the details, but the rough shape of it is that sales makes a lower base salary, but with a commission component that can lead to a higher salary than the standard one. I can't remember if there's also some sort of cap.
You could take it as undermining those other points, but I don't. (I am, of course, biased.) We didn't do this because we needed to address some failing of these other things, we did it because sales has an incredibly strong culture of this compensation model, to the degree that it would be difficult to hire otherwise. That isn't an issue with other staff.
Additionally, some of the points don't work the same way with sales, that is, the variability is easily measured and objective. Sales people don't write promo packets, you count up the amount they sold.
> we did it because sales has an incredibly strong culture of this compensation model, to the degree that it would be difficult to hire otherwise. That isn't an issue with other staff.
SF Bay Area SWEs are famously compensation-focused, and this uniform salary is basically Google new-grad SWE entry-level TC.
Are you hiring from the minority of good engineers who aren't driven primarily by compensation, but you just can't find the analog of that among good salespeople?
> Sales people don't write promo packets, you count up the amount they sold.
And you manage the imperfect alignment? (Imperfect, like the incentive to close a sale by lying to a customer, in a way that won't be discovered until next year. Or incentive to close a sale now, and don't communicate back a customer insight that would nudge the product line in a better direction longer-term, since that insight risks someone at the company wanting to talk to the customer, which puts the imminent commission at risk.)
> SF Bay Area SWEs are famously compensation-focused,
We don't hire only SF Bar Area SWEs. Only about a quarter of the company is in the Bay Area.
> but you just can't find the analog of that among good salespeople?
I'm not sure I've ever met an equivalent salesperson. Maybe that's a personal thing. Given the other responses in this thread, it seems to be fairly universal.
Thank you. Two followups, trying to learn from Oxide:
1. Did you go straight from founders and marketing/relations people doing sales, to hiring salespeople with a conventional compensation scheme? (Or were there some other things you tried in between?)
2. Given the opinionated and unconventional ideas that you have for engineering and product culture, and also given that traditional enterprise sales culture was powerful enough to overwhelm that for hiring... is there anything you're consciously trying to do differently in enterprise sales, and how do you accomplish that within the (fairly transactional?) relationship that you have with your sales team?
1. I don't work on that side of things, but yeah, that's my understanding. We did discuss if we were going to try and do the flat scheme, but I believe we made the decision to be more traditional before we ended up putting up the job descriptions.
2. I can't answer that, as I don't work on that, but maybe someone else will read the thread and chime in. Sorry about that!
In practice, you pay out the commission over time. So if someone was extremely deceptive, or the customer churns nearly immediately, you don't just keep getting the commission.
At Oxide's scale, it would likely be hard to hide out in the way you're suggesting. It's a very technical sale, and probably any material deal is going to involve some discussion with someone beyond just a single sales rep.
Perhaps to bcantrill's point in the post though, I would suggest you reconsider the assumption that Sales people are purely coin operated. I'd love to hear from their reps directly, but as an example from my own experience, lots of the early Google Cloud sales folks were there because they hated how places like Oracle or Microsoft treated their customers. They were absolutely taking less peak pay, for what they felt was a better relationship.
Sales is fundamentally about relationships and trust in this kind of high-touch transaction. Badly behaving reps are pretty quickly outed, one way or another, though at big companies it can take a while to fire them.
You could take it as undermining those other points, but I don't. (I am, of course, biased.) We didn't do this because we needed to address some failing of these other things, we did it because sales has an incredibly strong culture of this compensation model, to the degree that it would be difficult to hire otherwise. That isn't an issue with other staff.
Additionally, some of the points don't work the same way with sales, that is, the variability is easily measured and objective. Sales people don't write promo packets, you count up the amount they sold.