How much you can attribute the success of a sales person to the quality of their work is hard to know. Sometimes you get lucky and you get a hot lead which virt

How much you can attribute the success of a sales person to the quality of their work is hard to know. Sometimes you get lucky and you get a hot lead which virtually signs itself, sometimes you put lots of time and effort in and for no apparent reason the client backs out at the last minute. Yet typically you are only measured on completed deals. A target driven job with unemployment as the cost of failure, judged on simple metrics which do not correlate to effort or skill, and may be almost entirely out of personal control, creates a tension that most programmers are not subject to.