The Rise of Socialism in Sales: How Equal Outcomes Are Killing Merit and Performance

As a sales expert, I’m for capitalism while socialism, which is growing in popularity, has a history of destroying businesses, investment, and profits.

If you look closely, you’ll see that socialism has already crept into sales organizations in a big way. I’ll explain.

Commissions

When I started selling, most sales jobs were straight commission. You ate what you killed. You were paid what you were worth. Sales attracted the kind of people who were hungry, money motivated, and focused on results.

Compare that to the state of commissions in 2026. More and more companies have moved towards either a very generous base salary with a small commission percentage and/or bonus, or straight salary. Today, sales attracts a different kind of individual, one who would rather babysit accounts, accept orders, and simply be part of a big, well-known company, not because they can make a lot of money, but for bragging rights about the logo they work for.

When it’s straight salary or mostly salary with small commission, everyone is paid similarly. Equal outcomes. If you’re a superstar, you either won’t take that job or you’ll leave when you get upset that the salesperson who hardly works, or is ineffective, earns the same amount of money as you do. Equal outcomes is a hallmark of socialism.

More Money

Speaking of money, this method of compensation causes salespeople to go to management and request more money. Not, “How do I earn more money?” Not, “What can I do to be more effective so I make more money?” Just, I need more money.

My Dog, Dinger, benefits from a social welfare system. We do everything for him. We give him free medical care (2 torn ACLS), free education (I trained him), free food, free shelter, free recreation, free bathing, and much more. In return, he does nothing (except give us love). He’s unmotivated to work. Classic welfare.

When salespeople go to management and ask for more money, it’s pretty much the same deal. They’re not offering to do more, work harder, deliver more, close more business, retain more customers, or find new customers. They just want more money. That’s welfare!

Comparisons to Other Professions

Salespeople missed quota to the tune of 78% last year. What would happen if doctors achieved surgical success only 78% of time? Can you imagine if they came out of surgery, told the family their loved one died, and started blaming the hospital, the staff, the fee schedule, the technology, the difficult day they endured, or the economy? That’s what salespeople get away with when the framework is a socialist leaning sales organization.

The Defunding Thing

Socialists are in love with defunding the police, defunding ICE, and emptying the prisons. Have you seen that in sales organizations? I have.

Companies have been defunding accountability! Accountability is essentially the sales police. They’ve gone more for “kumbaya sales management” where that 78% failure rate is not only tolerated, it’s baked into the revenue recipe and expected. In a lot of companies, the C Suite doesn’t want top performers to earn exponentially more money than other salespeople – or them – so they cap their commissions and force them out of the company. Very smart move. Just like emptying the prisons!

DEI

Several years ago, when DEI was being widely adopted, companies believed they were doing great things for humanity by focusing their hiring on the Diversity part of DEI. Sales hiring suddenly morphed from “find me the best available salespeople” to find me people who identify differently than white, straight, men over 40. How did that work out?

One company we weren’t able to help hired 60 salespeople but cared only about identity. By 2026 none of those people remained in the sales department because they weren’t matches for their target customers and their target customers rejected them outright. And big surprise, based on HR’s criteria, they not only couldn’t sell, they couldn’t be trained to sell because they were personally offended by sales process and methodology. They were admittedly different and wanted to be seen as different in sales. They specialized in non-conformity and rejected all that was normal.

I helped another client hire 25 salespeople and 3 regional sales managers. They had a diversity mandate too but the difference was that they prioritized talent. They got their 28 AND a third of the hires were diverse! I’ll say it again – we prioritized talent!

Promotions

Salespeople become sales managers who, if they aren’t terminated for being a crappy sales managers, become Sales Leaders, not based on their performance, but based on their tenure! It’s like a baseball team promoting players to the 40-man roster basedo tenure in the organization instead of their performance track record. It’s socialism!

Time Machine?

Can we return to a time when merit was the basis for everything sales? Salespeople either succeeded and made lots of money, or they failed a couple of times and went into another line of work.

Each time we have a depression, recession, or pandemic, people who aren’t salespeople are given an ultimatum: Move into sales or you won’t have a job. A huge percentage of salespeople entered sales this way – very much not on purpose!

Merit solves most of the problems companies have with their sales organizations, although it might be more difficult to find good salespeople willing to work on merit. Salespeople have been spoiled or, as I wrote in this article, coddled.

Career Night

Speaking of finding more salespeople, one of the things that could help in a big way is high school career nights. Most high schools list all of the potential careers a graduating senior might want to consider and do you know which career is usually missing from those lists?

That’s right, sales.

Why isn’t it included? It pays well, it’s professional, and successful salespeople don’t have issues with job stability. There is a stigma about honesty in sales, but if that’s the problem, why list Attorney? Six years ago, when my son was a high school senior, I asked if they could add sales to the career night docket, I was ready to talk about it, but nobody showed up. Is sales not on the list because parents think it’s beneath their kids? Would parents be embarrassed if their kids became salespeople?

If you know anyone considering sales as a profession, my career night presentation was recorded and I included the short video below. Note: In 2020 I was the CEO of Objective Management Group but I exited in 2022. Today, I am still CEO of Kurlan & Associates.

What Can We Do?

The first step is awareness.

Take inventory. In how many areas of the sales organization has merit gone the way of the fax machine? What can be done to return to merit? Do you have the right team in place to move towards merit? You might not. Intrinsically motivated salespeople will not be very interested in a compensation plan that is heavily weighted towards commissions. Excuse Makers will not be very interested in sticking around to be held accountable.

Over the past several decades, our work with companies has included revamping/modifying compensation plans, promotion guidelines, performance expectations and accountability. Without exception, sales increase, morale improves and after a few expected changes in personnel, turnover stops cold. That’s right. When you have the right people on the team, and the culture is a sales culture, people stop the job hopping!

As I see it, companies have three options:

1. Do nothing – stay with the baked in equal outcomes on the sales team and pretend that everything is OK the way it is
2. Panic – recognize how screwed up it is, change everything tonight, watch most of the sales team exit tomorrow, and start over with a clean slate
3. Take a measured approach. Determine what must change, what should change, and what could change.
4. Reflect – do you have the right people for a revamped sales-driven organization?
5. Implement – you can do a phased launch so as not to be so obvious or dramatic about the changes

Coming to the proper conclusions in step 4 will require a sales team evaluation. We can help you with a scientific sales team assessment that will analyze and show how well-suited the current team is for the required change. We can also help you recover from choosing step 2, reviewing step 3, and implementing step 5.

If you would like to talk through any of this, you can reach out to us here.