Sales commissions are almost universally used in the software business, as in all business sectors. They are liked because they align incentives between sales staff and the companies that employ them. Nevertheless there are serious problems with the sales commission model, problems that led Thoughtworks to get rid of all sales commissions in 2013.

We concluded that our experiment with removing sales commissions led to an unacceptable reduction in the effectiveness of our sales capability, so we restored sales commissions in 2018.

Martin Fowler

18 February 2013

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(Quotations from ThoughtWorkers are extracted verbatim from internal emails.)