How To Lose Your Sales Rainmaker

Remember when you last hired a sales person for your company? Maybe your sales were not where you wanted them to be. You reviewed a ton of resumes and maybe got discouraged, thinking you were never going to find exactly what you were looking for. And then you got the perfect resume; you interviewed the person and found out they had the golden touch. They had an awesome work history, no job hopping; and they had made money hand over fist for every company they ever worked for. So you made them an offer and they accepted.

Have you been doing all that you can since you hired them to make sure that Rainmaker wants to stay with your company? Or are you starting to feel like you're paying them too much money?

It may sound crazy, but I know of several Rainmakers that had that happen to them!

When the Rainmaker was hired, they were offered a modest base salary and a commission plan that was based on performance. After a few months, their commission checks were pretty significant. $20,000 commission checks were nothing unusual. Of course, the company was seeing sales that were astronomical, thanks to that Rainmaker's efforts. Then the Rainmaker closed a Monster deal - Multi-million dollar sale - and his commission check was going to be over $100,000.

The company did a double take - They thought that was WAY too much money to pay to a sales person for a single deal. So they sat down with the Rainmaker and said they wanted him to take a reduced commission for that sale. They wanted to limit him to a maximum amount he could earn on that kind of sale. About one-half the amount he should have received.

The Rainmaker was angry. He felt betrayed by the company he had worked so hard for. And he left the company to go work for one of their competitors. The customer that he had worked with for nearly a year to close that multi-million dollar deal was also angry. The new sales person that was assigned to their account didn't know all the minutae that the original Rainmaker had known about them, was not as responsive to their calls and needs; in short, the new sales person didn't do as good a job overall. The sale fell through. The company lost the money.

But, more importantly, the company lost their Rainmaker and any future sales he would have made for them. Everyone lost.

How would you have handled that if you were the employer?