Never Sit in the Lobby by Glenn Poulos

Author:Glenn Poulos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oak Blue Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

My Mentor Made Me Do It

Imagine going home from work and telling your wife or husband, “Hey honey, I’ve decided to take the leap into sales. My salary will go from $80,000 to a $45,000 base salary plus the ability to earn up to $55,000 in commissions my first year, and unlimited ceiling on what I can earn going forward.”

“What?” the spouse says. “You took a 50% pay cut for some sales job?”

“That’s right sweetie, and I’ve never been more excited about a job in my life.”

When you present an offer to someone that has a base plus commission component, or in our lingo, a fixed and variable portion, I believe about 90% of the recipients and their significant others fixate on what’s guaranteed and struggle to consider the total target earnings (TE) potential. To give you an example, imagine I offer someone an $80,000 package with a 60% base ($48,000) and 40% variable (up to $32,000 in commissions). They’re currently earning $58,000 as a system engineer.

At home, they discuss the job offer with their partner, but the spouse can’t get past the base since it’s a few thousand a year less than their current base salary. Despite explaining to them that their earnings potential would increase $20,000 or more, they’re dead-set on increasing their base salary. So, I revise the offer with an increase in base pay, but their commission quota is cut in half. The rep doesn’t mind—in fact, they smile from ear to ear.

So, imagine the leap of faith required for someone to make a jump from driving a forklift in the warehouse for $45,000 per year to a sales job with a base of only $36,000? This is one example of how mentoring is so powerful.

At one of my firms, we had a guy named Steve who did miscellaneous tasks for us like product inspections, testing, and driving the forklift. He was in his mid-20s and didn’t have a post-secondary education. In fact, he hadn’t finished high school either, and was working on his GED. This didn’t prevent him from being a quick study, however.

At first, he was a pure warehouse guy packing boxes and moving skids around. But in time he began to stand out—particularly when we did special services for some customers. So we trained him to do special testing and reporting on a large upcoming project that evolved into minor repairs and tweaks to some items to ensure they were in spec before they shipped out. He did this job for almost five years, and in that time we came to learn he was a sponge when it came to cars and anything else he was passionate about, which turned out to be a lot of things.

In my daily trips around the building, I learned that Steve really wanted more. That more included more money, but he also wanted more challenge, flexibility, opportunity, and acknowledgement. Far more than he was going to get with us driving a forklift. Given his ability to ramble

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