Potty training and sales compensation

Potty training and sales compensation is a blog post in which Matt Asay, father of 3, describes how he used chocolate as an incentive to convince Lily to visit the restroom.

In his post, Matt raises an interesting topic: When does compensating multiple people on the same deal make sense? According to him it makes sense especially early in a company's life when cooperation is more important that competition. He also mentions that rewarding team effort is more important than rewarding a short-term hit due to excess commission.

I posted articles on the topic of group competition and group rewards here and here. Like I said, it's a very interesting topic for which there is no clear-cut answer... it really depends on individual situations. It is true that it would seem logical to try to tie an incentive to the person 'most responsible' for the sale, but this usually does not reflect reality where multiple people, teams, channel sales people, direct sales people, etc, all collaborate [in harmony].