If your event's sales force is paid on commission only, it will sell whatever closes fast and walk away from whatever pa
If your event's sales force is paid on commission only, it will sell whatever closes fast and walk away from whatever pays the bills.
That holds for sponsorship, for floor space, and for attendee registration. It holds in the domestic market and it holds twice as hard internationally. And it is not a character flaw in the people selling. It is the incentive design doing exactly what it was written to do.
What does a pure success fee tell a salesperson?
One thing only: bring in what converts within thirty days. A rep with no base salary has to cover the month, so they chase the small package that closes over the phone, the exhibitor who came last year, the last-minute registration. Anything that takes six months of work before it becomes a contract gets pushed to later, and later never comes.
Where it breaks, in practice:
- The large sponsorship package. It involves a committee, an annual budget, and legal review. Nobody paid on commission alone will sustain three months of meetings with zero revenue.
- The new exhibitor. It takes five times the effort of a renewal, and the commission is the same. The result is a floor plan full of repeat exhibitors and no new accounts.
- The international buyer. Twelve-month cycle, time zones, complex contracts. On a pure success fee, that work simply does not get done.
- The base between editions. Logging the reason a deal was lost, mapping who decides, preparing next season. None of that pays commission, so none of it happens.
The fix is not a higher percentage. It is a different structure.
The model that works combines two parts. A fixed fee, which covers the operating cost of selling (people, tools, travel, prospecting) and guarantees that long-cycle work gets done even in a month when nothing closes. And a commission on results, which keeps the team committed to the target and aligns the seller's interest with the organizer's.
The fixed fee buys continuity. The commission buys ambition. One without the other produces either a comfortable team or a team that only picks the low-hanging fruit.
The question that usually exposes the problem: over the last twelve months, how many completely new accounts did your sales team bring in, and how many were renewals? If the second list is much longer than the first, the incentive is pointing the wrong way.