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Why should the employment question for salesmen be, "How generous can we afford to be?", when for everyone else it's "How stingy can we afford to be?"? The who
by eli_gottlieb 11y ago
Why should the employment question for salesmen be, "How generous can we afford to be?", when for everyone else it's "How stingy can we afford to be?"? The whole reason a company hires any employee, at all, is because it's profitable. The question is why employees who don't contribute to the core mission of the firm should receive 90% of the revenue they generate, while those who do receive a fixed salary irrespective of revenue (and also have to work long hours and take few vacations).
- aianus 11y agoBecause to the CEO and the board and the shareholders the salesman contributes to the core mission of the firm (bringing in dollars) and the engineer just contributes to the costs.
- radmuzom 11y agoBy that logic, just fire all the engineers - costs go down and the dollars brought in remain constant or increases - hence the company makes more profits.
- manigandham 11y agoThis happens all the time. Engineering is outsourced or team is moved to another project and the same product is sold for a long time.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoI'm certain that the optimal state of our entire economy is for every firm to make absolutely nothing at all -- except sales. Who needs a product with all that money coming in for free? /s
- qq66 11y agoThe reason that top salespeople make so much money is that they're pretty much fungible across industry (they can sell basically anything to anyone), so there is a lot of competition for top salespeople. In industries where profit margins are very high (financial products, enterprise software, pharmaceuticals), these companies fiercely compete to get the best-performing reps, paying almost up to the marginal profit from each rep.
- verinus 11y agowell I really don't believe this to be true. Even a salesman has to have something to sell- without good engineering they can't. imho the profits have to be split...
- sikosmurf 11y agoThe impetus of this discussion is that pharma companies are buying rights to drugs. So it seems that, no, they don't need to research and create the drugs to market them.