Sales Commissions Should Flow From Banked Revenue, Not Booked Meetings

Original source: Adem Manderovic | Closed Circuit Selling™ (CCS)
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This video from Adem Manderovic | Closed Circuit Selling™ (CCS) covered a lot of ground. 6 segments stood out as worth your time. Everything below links directly to the timestamp in the original video.

If your sales team gets paid before the customer pays you, this conversation will make you rethink your entire comp structure.

Sales Commissions Should Flow From Banked Revenue, Not Booked Meetings

Adem Manderovic argues that paying salespeople on meetings booked, finance applications submitted, or opportunities opened — before a single dollar clears the bank — is structurally insolvent. His fix is blunt: route commissions to marketing, business development, and customer success only after a contract has generated billable revenue sufficient to cover those payouts. He also contends that entry-level sellers should spend time in customer success first, learning what makes a deal actually serviceable before they're allowed to promise anything to a prospect.

"Have we banked the revenue that we're paying out to our people, no matter which department they're in? If you're upside down on that, you've got a problem."

▶ Watch this segment — 15:53

The Lost Art of Feedback Loops: What Modern Sales Teams Forgot

Manderovic points to two practices that largely vanished from sales teams after 2011 — systematically asking both won and lost customers why they bought or walked away, and running live quoting days where key stakeholders gather to field objections in real time and agree on a path forward. Together, these generated the market intelligence that once kept sales and marketing tightly aligned. Their absence, he argues, is the root cause of the churn and wasted pipeline that revenue leaders now scramble to fix after the fact.

"These things are just not skills that we see in today's market, and that's the downstream repercussion of sales-led growth."

▶ Watch this segment — 4:15

A Wellness Company's Stagnant Revenue Revealed a Simple Math Problem

Manderovic describes a recent engagement with a wellness company whose ad returns looked healthy on paper but whose revenue refused to grow. A straightforward financial model told the story: once average transaction value, customer lifetime value, and operational costs were factored in, the company's lead acquisition cost was three times what the business could profitably sustain. His broader advice for making this case to skeptical CEOs is to reverse-engineer a handful of closed-won deals — mapping every lead, contact, and meeting it took to land one paying client — then compare that cost against what a less market-burning approach might require.

"What is the lost opportunity cost of burning 97% of people that are never going to buy?"

▶ Watch this segment — 26:34

Churn Often Starts at the Moment a Deal Is Signed, Not After

Manderovic traces high customer churn to a failure that happens before onboarding begins: no agreed communication plan, no confirmed backup contacts, no clarity on service requirements. His sharpest example is a contract that went live only for the delivery team to discover the client expected three on-site representatives — a requirement that exceeded the contract's entire value, turning the engagement into an immediate loss. He argues that what Australia and New Zealand call a communication plan, the UK labels a MAP, and North America terms a succession plan all solve the same problem: preventing post-sale surprises that damage both retention and market reputation.

"You wouldn't need reactivation if you followed the plan in the first place, because that's part of your commercial handover."

▶ Watch this segment — 13:48

CRO School Built to Recover Sales Fundamentals Lost Since 2011

Manderovic traces a specific turning point: Aaron Ross's book Predictable Revenue, published in 2011, and Oracle's earlier push to separate the meeting-booking function reshaped how sales organisations were structured. The efficiency gains came at a cost — the connective practices that linked business development to both marketing and customer success were stripped out, and an entire generation of sales managers rose through a system that never taught them those fundamentals. CRO School, built with collaborator George Kuris, grew from a LinkedIn conversation into a full curriculum and advisory service aimed at restoring what was lost.

"We've now got a layer of management in charge of the next group of people showing them only one way to do things, without understanding that the way they're doing it ensures the next line of leadership also has no idea what these fundamentals were."

▶ Watch this segment — 1:19

Cataloging the Market Tells You Who Will Buy and When — Before You Pitch

Rather than pushing every prospect into a meeting regardless of where they are in their buying journey, Manderovic advocates for what he calls cataloging the market — a structured conversation that uncovers who a potential customer currently uses, what they like and dislike about that provider, and when their next evaluation is likely to occur. That intelligence feeds directly back to marketing for content creation and proposal development, and produces a forward-looking pipeline that shows which companies are likely to buy next month, in three months, or in six — letting sales teams arrive with tailored proposals at precisely the right moment rather than burning contacts who aren't ready.

"There isn't a more direct way to do that that I'm aware of — it's that simple. You just need to know what the 'in' is for your industry to have that discussion."

▶ Watch this segment — 9:09

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• Adem Manderovic advises companies with existing reverse headcount models to… (24:30)
• A wellness company that appeared successful on paper but suffered from stagnant… (29:58)
• Marketing and sales alignment can be achieved if business development teams… (31:47)
• Adem Manderovic envisions a future where sales interactions are based on… (33:57)
• Implementing his proposed system requires an initial audit of current processes… (35:53)
• A shift in market understanding, with companies now recognizing the value of… (39:28)
• Adem Manderovic advises companies to identify red flags in their revenue… (41:51)
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