If you have been a sales person, you know how important it is to get a fair goal and a good commission plan. A good commission plan can be a great motivator, a bad one which pays you hardly anything can be a terrible drag on morale.
In order to have a fair goal, you need a couple of things. One is you need some good historical numbers. Two you have to have an ethical application of resources along with a fair consideration of trends which are relevant to what you are selling.
Even if you get a fair goal, you still need a compensation system that allows you to see, understand, and verify your numbers. Of course you also need a way for the company to collect numbers.
Collecting numbers is easy if all your business is direct, it is much more challenging if resellers are mixed in with direct especially if the resellers are competing with the direct business.
Unfortunately all of this really does not matter very much if the company has embarked on a program of commission control which is likely high on the agenda at Apple.
Driving success in a company is all about sharing the success. Unfortunately "sharing" and Apple do not do very well in the same sentence. Anyone that has worked for Apple quickly finds out that Apple is all about Apple and very little about the employees or even customers.
Smart companies treat employees fairly and work very hard at doing it. Apple is run in such a way that quotas and commissions are used as tools to reward or discipline different organizations. Maybe a better way to say it is that key executives are given enough leeway at Apple to set organizational goals and even compensation plans in such a way to either make themselves look good or particular people look bad. Because these executives are ethically challenged, they see nothing wrong with rewarding their buddies and strangling those they perceive to be a threat to their power.
You would think when an organization grew the business extraordinarily well in a very tough market for Apple, even selling against a monopolist, that those people would be exceptionally well compensated. Of course in most companies you would be right. At Apple, people doing just that, demonstrating huge gains against a monopoly position, were rewarded with declining compensation over a four year period.
Does that make business sense? Of course not, it only makes sense it you are using compensation as a tool to consolidate power or in an attempt to make one group look better than another.
Of course that is the Apple way of doing business. Things have to go as the executives have planned it or they look bad, so they manage to make those whom they said would do poorly look bad even if they are doing really well. It is Apple reality at its best.
Apple actually takes it well beyond this and has a history of "losing" compensation revenue, sometimes as large as eight figures, randomly stopping collection of certain revenue streams, or making decisions that hot selling products do not qualify for commissions. Then there is always the special trick of being goaled on revenue that never existed or pricing products wrong in the system so credit is properly received. Apple has done it all either through carelessness or lack of ethics.
Of course there are whole teams at Apple competing against each other. Who wins is often not the best sales person, but the organization that finance likes the best or in other words the organization that wins is the one that gets the steepest total discount from finance.
It is very easy for finance to decide that they want a particular customer to go one way or another. They are very aware of total discount structures and without question have the ultimate authority.
Of course if finance really dislikes you, they can give pricing authority to another Apple group and allow them to call on your customers and offer them better pricing than you can provide.
Surprisingly if can get even worse. For example Apple can tell you are selling and receiving credit for all "Federal business" in your compensation agreement and turn around and make an executive decision that computers being bought with federal money aren't federal business.
If that isn't enough, Apple can turn around in a few months and declare as federal for marketing purposes the very same sale which they had ruled as not federal for compensation purposes. Remember up is down in the Apple world.
If you are getting the picture that Apple can and does do pretty much anything they want in the compensation arena, you're absolutely right. How far the funny numbers go into the corporation, I have not idea.
I do know that using goals and compensation to make certain organizations look better or worse go right to the top of the Apple sales organization.
It is also pretty clear that goals handed out to people at Apple have more to do with whether or not the executives and managers like you and want you to stay than they do about rewarding high performers or even building a stronger sales force. I suspect they may be used as a way to move out expensive older employees and replace them with younger ones.
As far as Apple is concerned the sales force is unfortunately a necessary evil to managed to the lowest possible expense so even more can be siphoned off to the executives and their buddies.
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