I'm not saying it applies to every salesman, but say a company with an existing product makes a new sale - the money from that is mostly down to the salesperson

I'm not saying it applies to every salesman, but say a company with an existing product makes a new sale - the money from that is mostly down to the salesperson who closes the deal. I'm sure it depends on the situation. Anyway, the point was more that it is possible for one person to be worth say 10 million USD to a company at a particular time, even if it is quite uncommon. This is just an expression in the difference in scale between a single person's resources and those of a corporation - if any individual has access to the leverage and resources of a large corporation, they could easily make/lose a lot of money for that company very quickly, sometimes down to dumb luck, sometimes down to skill at their particular niche. Of course the society which allows the limited liability company to exist might want to redistribute some of that wealth more evenly, because capitalism is pretty unfair and brutal in its raw form, but an individual can certainly be worth lots to a company in monetary terms, because they can make a lot.