It can be a fundamentally shitty job. In 2000 when I was selling Sun servers and Oracle licenses to dot coms it was a fundamentally awesome job. My golf game im

It can be a fundamentally shitty job. In 2000 when I was selling Sun servers and Oracle licenses to dot coms it was a fundamentally awesome job. My golf game improved a lot in those years :) There is no simple answer here. You can hire smart salespeople that care about the company and know when to walk away from a bad deal. That comes from corporate culture too though. For all the lip service about good sales and partnering with clients at the end of the month or quarter most of my employers have not given one shit about anything except getting the deals done. It's not salespeople that creates bad sales, it's management. We just do what we are paid to do. If you create an environment where the sales force is expected to bring in only deals that are good for the company, and pay the sales force in a way that allows them to walk away from bad deals without worrying about the mortgage that month, it can and will work. Commission can be a part of that setup, but it can't be 75% of the comp plan. Pay the sales force a base they can live on during a bad month, with commission or bonuses that reward them for bringing in the right kind of new business, and it can be a win-win set up. It's not rocket science.