The thing that's unusual about sales is that it's the only metric that anyone's ever found that's (mostly) an exception to Goodhart's Law. Companies would love to pay a lot more people on commission if you could find a way to calculate commissions that gave the desired incentives.
It's not really that it's an exception to Goodharts Law, it's that Goodhart's Law only applies to measured proxies. If the goal of a company is first and foremost to make money, then sales is the only organization within the company that can be measured exactly according to the primary goal of the company rather than a proxy.
Goodhart's Law still applies to the extent that companies have other goals and sales's incentives totally screw those goals up. But they are very effective incentives at increasing money earned.
> If the goal of a company is first and foremost to make money, then sales is the only organization within the company that can be measured exactly according to the primary goal of the company rather than a proxy.
This feels culturally accurate but also reductive. The best sales teams cannot sustainably sell a product that fails to have product-market fit. Likewise, the best product requiring a sales-led GTM will fail if sales teams are not able to understand and articulate the value.
A compensation imbalance between customer-facing and non-facing roles builds an imbalance of power dynamics within a company that will ultimately destabilize the culture and success of a company.
