They aren’t, though. TOP salesman skills are highly rewarded, but median performers are the among the first to go. Low performers, because sales is the easiest place to measure performance, find themselves on the street within a month.
That all said - Wells Fargo was right to cancel - it just looks bad.
From the MSNBC story (bolding mine):
Ummm… ok?
I mean, hell, if you have the money in your own pockets to spend on this, you sure as hell don’t need our $25 billion, right? I’m trying to figure out how the bolded portion was supposed to make me feel better.
The taxpayer money was going to be spent on hookers and blow. Not on the TRIP itself.
Well, OK, then, if the cocaine is locally produced and the hookers are US citizens. And, to be fair, this is about all the entertainment available, financial professionals are too prudent to gamble.
What skills does a top salesman have? I ask because I have no idea, other than, at a guess, the ability to convince someone to buy the product by lying about it. If the product is good, and there are buyers out there, what extra things does a salesman have to do other than lay the product out before the potential customers?
In addition to lying (my father was top salesman in the company he worked for), they also have to have a savvy eye for opportunities. Your product might be identical to that produced by your competitor, but if you can get there before the other guy, you’ll make the sale and he won’t. And you have to be really good at networking, so you can keep on top of all the potential leads that might be out there. You also have to be willing to shrug off rejection, and be able to go on to the thousandth customer, even though the previous 999 have turned you down. “Hustle” is your middle name, no matter what it might say on your birth certificate.
That’s cool, because shooting looters during a disaster is part of our culture.
What about all the waitresses and bartenders and cab drivers and hookers in Vegas? What are they going to do now? Won’t somebody please think about the hookers?
I’m thinking about them right now…
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“Why did you leave your last position?”
“The company refused to pay me a huge bonus I deserved for making a lot of sales. They had some lame excuse about how too many bad sales had forced them into bankruptcy.”
And how many companies in the financial sector are actually looking for sales people? Yeah, yeah, yeah, a good salesman is worth his weight in gold, yada, yada, yada, but lets face it, nearly all such companies are shedding jobs. The pool of available talent is huge, both here and abroad. I seriously doubt that someone is going to jump ship just because they didn’t get a bonus this year. There’s simply nowhere to go, and probably dozens, if not hundreds, of people applying for any openings that might appear.
“I brought in $X millions in revenue, and they could not to pay my commission because they screwed up their valuation model.”
“Great - here is your comp plan, go make us both some money.”
I have hired many reps who ran into capped comp plans, where the cap was added once the rep showed that they could blow the roof off of the plan. I would give them an uncapped plan, and happily count the money that they brought me.
Yeah, Wells didn’t want the bailout money. Wells actually asked not to get the bailout money at one point. Wells only lost money in the 4th quarter because of the purchase of Wacovia which was in worse shape than anyone thought, and Wells is quite probably the only genuinly strong bank left in the country. Maybe B of A is as strong, but Meryll Lynch was in more trouble than anyone thought also.
It looks bad, so yeah I suppose Wells did the right thing in cancelling the trip, (because public sentiment was against them and that would hurt them in the sort term which no one can afford right now), but they actually could have afforded to do this trip and their earners actually do deserve to get it. They weren’t the ones selling risky mortgages.
I’m not in banking, but our sales trip was cancelled this year as well. It totally sucks, but we’re doing what we can to run a leaner company and weather out this economic storm.
Well no fucking shit. With a $25,000,000,000 shot in the arm, I’d be pretty fucking healthy, too. 
Goldman Sachs announced their intent to pay back their government money ASAP. Any time Wells Fargo wants to cut Washington a $25 billion check, they’re more than welcome to go back to spending cash on Vegas trips.
My sister is a mortgage banker for Wells Fargo and she was supposed to go out of town this week but she had to cancel on account of family stuff. I wonder if she was going to Las Vegas?
Who would want, as a reward for a job well done, a week in Vegas with your coworkers and bosses? Jeezus, just give me the cash and a suite room in NY away from all those losers. But I guess that’s why I’m not a salesman.
So, how many of the reps you hired, would have stayed at a company where the upper management made horrific decisions that nearly doomed the company, even if the reps had gotten their full commission?
In my experience, if sales gets paid - sales sticks around.