source: https://twitter.com/wagslane/status/1637910671781404673
image description:
a girl is smiling in front of the camera, not directly looking at it. in front of her is a big cake. the text on her reads, “PM showing off latest features”
just on the left and a little behind is a guy, out of focus, blankly staring at the cake. the text on him reads, “dev getting 0 credit”
As a sales guy myself by training and tech sales by profession that sounds very much like there are some very fucked incentive structures at play that need to be addressed. If they’re only monitored on number of deals closed then you get shit like that trying to meet targets and get the bonus that is extremely standard in the sales profession and account for a large share of the yearly salary. If they’re measured on profitability then you wouldn’t see that, they’d drop stingy clients themselves for wasting their time. Another solution I’ve seen is having a larger bonus for customer satisfaction and renewals / growing the contract but that only really works out if your sales also doubles as account managers.
Possibly. It’s entirely opaque where I work. I have no clue how they’re compensated whatsoever. We managed to fix it for the most part. I like the customer satisfaction approach via renewals as a target. Especially since you can basically give that to everyone involved on the project. Then again, some customers are dissatisfied as a policy. Worked with some miserable folk who always communicated in a horrible, horrible way but kept renewing and never balked at the cost. It was simply a “you’re a service provider, you’re beneath us” thing. Some people truly suck.