Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

by Geoffrey A. Moore

By contrast, compensation for account penetration by a pioneer salesperson should have the opposite characteristics. It should provide the bulk of its rewards immediately, in recognition of a single key achievement—winning the account. This is an extraordinary event, one that few can accomplish, and it is critical to determining the firm’s long-term future. It is an extraordinarily high-risk endeavor, with the odds stacked heavily against the salesperson. It therefore deserves extraordinary compensation. On the other hand, if it was achieved by promising more than anyone can deliver, perhaps even more than anyone really knew, then that is not behavior we want to reward. So, although we would like the compensation to be front-loaded, there must also be a reality check built into the process. Because the pioneer salesperson will be moving on, we do not want an extended compensation program, and thus equity, for example, is an inappropriate vehicle. Taking all this together, the situation argues for a bonus-based program more than a straight commission approach—something lucrative for the salesperson, event-driven and over and done with relatively quickly, and not so closely tied to revenue recognition that either the pioneer has to overstay his or her welcome in order to reap the rewards or earns an extraordinary cash reward