

What's fair Sales Commission compensation for me? - networkguy

I&#x27;m looking for some insight here, I&#x27;m a Sr. Systems Engineer for the Value Added Reseller (VAR) I work with.<p>Recently, I&#x27;ve moved to a new city, a city where we don&#x27;t have our own office yet. I&#x27;m essentially the beginning of our expansion into this city.<p>How I got to this situation is I&#x27;ve always wanted to move back to the city I&#x27;m in and back in September I got a job offer for a little over $20,000 more than I&#x27;m making today at my current company. The company I work for is small &gt;25 people and the job offer came from a VAR with over 500 people.<p>I love working with the people I work with, my bosses and my work and when they were eager to keep me, I said I&#x27;d stay and give it a go and we would work through the details of earning more later.<p>Obviously to get paid more I my work needs to justify it, which is why part of my goal is to grow the business by finding new customers and generating sales.<p>The bosses pulled me into the office and discussed the exact same thing, but weren&#x27;t sure about the compensation model yet.<p>Where I&#x27;m stuck is that I want a commission model that will allow me see the upside of growing the business, but at the same time, I&#x27;m paid a salary and my primary job role has been up until now, technical.<p>I believe our outside sales rep gets 30% on the profits for the business generated, and at first I was thinking that because I have a salary and he&#x27;s 100% commission that my commission should be less, however in thinking it a bit more, isn&#x27;t the value and the benefit the same?<p>I&#x27;ve never been in a sales type role before, and I have no idea how the commission structure should be handled in my situation; obviously the bosses (at least one of them) want to keep this as small as possible because it&#x27;s more profit for them and the company especially when they aren&#x27;t paying it out to the outside sales rep at 30%.<p>Any ideas? I&#x27;m completely out of my element here.
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welshguy
Good bosses will want to design a system where you're incentivised to hell, so
that you can all be successful. Selling new business is vastly different to
selling to an established customer base (upgrades etc) - this would typically
be acknowledged in a higher commission rate. Personally, if I were a sales
manager, and other things being equal, I'd find it really difficult to pay you
the same as a commission-only rep - things have to be seen to be fair, as well
as to be fair. What if the commission-only rep found out you were on the same
commission rate as well as drawing a salary?

Often, sales reps are paid on a sliding scale, geared to pay higher commission
rates after a certain amount of revenue is achieved. There are many ways to
skin a cat!

As a reference point, when I worked in a new business sales organisation, my
commission plan awarded me 10% of revenue (not profit) which I regarded as
wonderfully incentivising.

