If the person that sold that deal was not a boeing employee, which is likely, whatever the commission was it also included massive kickbacks, wining and dining, and all sorts of other expenses. I’d be surprised if it was more than 1-2 percent. Again, when you look at these commissions, also need to figure out the net commission after all expenses.
Or in the case of certain countries, Boeing will be forced to go throught the Emir’s brother’s son’s wife as the “sales agent.”
Hey, if I could do math I’d be a lender.:o
In the case of a deal in the billion dollar ballpark, the company’s CEO is the “salesguy”.
Selling Boeing jets comes to mind as a potentially 7 figure sales job. I wonder how much Seddik Belyamani earns.
My dad spent his entire career selling industrial systems for GE. Turbines, industrial motors, manufacturing robots, stuff like that. Those machines can easily cost millions of dollars, including service packages and whatnot. He did well, but not like “million dollars a year” well. I’m not sure of the sales process, but it’s not like he goes around cold calling factories for commissions.
It’s not just about being at the right place at the right time, or about knowing the right right people to get you into the job. It’s a real perfect storm of luck and skill:
[ul]
[li]You have to be at a time and place where such an opportunity exists.[/li][li]You need to already know–really, really know–the industry involved so that you know EXACTLY what people want/need, what problems they face, what other products you are competing against. ETA: This is probably the step people misunderstand the most. They think they just need to learn the product. [/li][li]You need to already know people in the industry. Part of being a successful salesperson is finding new clients.[/li][li]You have to have extraordinary people skills. And I don’t mean “people generally like me”, I don’t even mean “rock-star charisma”, I mean the knack of being able to instantly see who you need to be to sync with a particular person and be able to slip believably into that role–and to be able to maintain 2-3 different roles simultaneously without anyone in a group noticing.[/li][li]You have to be incredibly high-energy and upbeat. Wildly successful salespeople work insane hours–easily 60-80 hours a week, especially at first. And there are no easy hours there: that’s 60-80 hours a week talking to people, staying “on” and facing rejection after rejection and finding deadend after deadend. You can’t ever seem tired or be cranky. You have to be the kind of person who can put hours and hours into something, have it fall apart, and not miss a beat.[/li][/ul]
You don’t need all these things to make a living in sales. But all the really successful salespeople I have ever known/encountered were more than just the right person at the right place: they were extraordinarily talented people who lived their job, and even with their talents it was not an easy life.
If the story is actually based on some facts, it probably occurred some time in the 70s or 80s before the cost of image processing became much cheaper starting in the mid 90s.
More importantly, while there are some image processing systems which also output microfilm for achieve purposes, current systems store images in data formats.
The numbers would most likely be “adjusted for inflation” e.g., a system sold in the 70s may have been $1 million (please note this is not based on any actual numbers, see below), and the person relating the story upped the numbers to make the math work for retirement now.
Also, this type of equipment is now always sold in systems and not simply units. I can’t see how a completely analog system could cost $10 million, or even $1 million for just microfilm equipment only.
When things are sold as systems, then the percentage available for straight commission decreases, as more engineers, etc., are involved.
A Japanese friend who used to work for a well-known Japanese company and was the sales manager for their mail sorting machines (which sold for more than a million dollars. They had a 3% budget for bribes, and he couple personally sign off on 1% without head office approval.
The problem with many countries is that it’s not clear who needs to be bribed, and foreign companies can spend huge amounts of money bribing the wrong people. It’s not like they are going to tell you they don’t have any authority or influence. One big reasons for partnering with local companies was because they already knew who needs the love.
The Japanese construction industry is notoriously corrupt, with 2% to 3% of the billions spent on dams, bridges and roads coming straight back to the politicians who authorized the money.
A personal anecdote here. My father was in industrial sales. The product was a commodity, but a commodity that had to be made to very high specs. The entire U.S. market was divided among about six suppliers, and the costs of entry were so high that no one was trying to break in.
He chose to work for straight salary and bonus rather than commission. Once he explained to me the upsides and downsides of salary vs. commission. At the time, he was booking a little more than $22 million annually. He explained that if he had chosen commission, he would have grossed about $225,000, but it would have been a boom-and-bust type income.
Even with my limited math skills I knew that $225K is only about one percent of $22M. That had to be more or less standard for the industry, otherwise there would have been a lot more competition among the suppliers to hire away each other’s sales forces.
I do actually know one person who got a $2 million commission - but he was the CEO and he engineered the sale of the company, so that was a one-time-only deal.
Did this post make anyone else want to rewatch Death of a Fucking Salesman?
Actually this story supposedly took place sometime in the early 90s. And I do agree that most companies no longer pay this kind of commissions nowadays.
I’m curious about the sales folks who sell military technologies to foreign countries, such as older fighter jets and missiles. How much do those guys earn?
aside from real estate, i’d would think heavy industrial and mining equipment and installations. however, your notion of selling is probably closer to retail selling for individual consumers (that door-to-door thing.) industrial sales is a bit more scientific (for want of a better word.) you approach a prospective client only after careful research. you have to understand technical requirements and specifications. you have to time your maketing with their own schedules and of course to get ahead of the other salesmen. after sales services have to be there and quality assurance.
When I sold insurance, we had a “sales summit” where a million-dollar producer spoke to us about how to build a successful practice. She makes over a million dollars a year in commission, some from new sales, and some from existing policies. She now has assistants who do the client servicing work, which leaves her more time to sell new policies, but she has to cover their salaries and benefits. (IIRC, she said she has two assistants who each make $70,000 per year in salary and benefits.) She’s also got an accountant to do the books and has to keep a lawyer on retainer.
It was also a long slog to get to that point; she had to sell a lot of el cheapo term life policies to get established before she could get the client base to be able to sell more expensive whole-life. Some of her sales require a lot of prep work to structure the deal, and she doesn’t see that money until the sale is completed and the application is accepted by the company. Since the kinds of clients she has tend to be fairly wealthy, she has to be where they are, which means putting in face time with local charities’ galas and boards of directors, with no guarantee that there will be a sale.
She may sell a lot of insurance, and she may make a lot of commission, but it costs time and money to be that successful.
I also interviewed with a State Farm agent, who has equally high expenses. He has to pay for marketing materials, leads, and other stuff to attract new clients, and while property and casualty insurance pays fairly well, that is contingent on making a lot of new sales and keeping your existing clients happy enough to stick with you, and as Dante can attest, some of those clients can be a little, well, high-maintenance and take up a lot of time and resources to keep. Getting rid of them as customers means losing money, so you don’t want to do that.
Being a partner in a law or consulting firm or investment bank is essentially a high 6 to 7+ figure sales job. It usually takes anywhere from 7-15 years to go from being an entry level analyst grinding through whatever mundate tasks analysts work on in your particular industry. The problem is that it is often difficult to transition from being a “grinder” to management to a more relationship-based sales role since they are all very different skills.
The “microfilm” story sounds like BS. I mean it shouldn’t be that hard to Google what this magical super-expensive device was.
I work in the medical device industry where devices and machines to build those devices easily run into the millions of dollars. A lot of these companies employ many millionaires however they tend to be of the CEO or VP variety, not the sales staff.
I don’t know anything about million dollar sales but in the oil industry it isn’t unusual for me to have people trying to sell me 6 figure items. Most of the sales guys I know don’t get commissions they are salary and get bonuses based on how their business unit is doing. Of course most of the people I know well enough to know their salaries are technical sales which might be a different game then the pure sales reps.
I am friends with a guy who just sold my company ten 100K items and I know he didn’t get any part of that but he’s been promoted rapidly and is now an engineering manager for his company and probably makes more than I do.
After reading this thread, I asked my company’s head of sales about this (it’s a small company, so that is not much of a boast).
He said for a company like Boeing, the sales person would have a bonus structure set up based on the revenue brought in rather than getting a percentage of that revenue as commission.
Nah. You just need to be tall.
Thx CCYMan. Now we just need to find out how much that can amount to in dollars.