What to Expect from CommissionOnly.com

Everything you need to know
about commission-only sales and CommissionOnly.com.

This page...

(1) explains what to expect from CommissionOnly.com

(2) explains what we recommend to maximize results for your business

(3) provides a one-month free trial to qualified companies (no credit card required)

Saddle up! This post—which will give you a great primer on commission-only sales success—will take about 10 minutes to read.

Here’s what you can expect from CommissionOnly.com if you list your company, so our community of +11,000 sales reps can see it and sell for you:

CommissionOnly.com is a matchmaker. We will drive a high volume of applications from salespeople willing to work on commission only (i.e., you pay them nothing until they sell).
- We’ll consistently shortlist the best, most qualified candidates for you, saving you a ton of time and helping increase the speed at which you can expand to new markets.
  - Note: It’s rare to have access to qualified reps willing to work on commission only. The percentage of salespeople willing to work without a base salary is about 6% (source: QuotaPath). We’ve amassed a database of more than 11,000 of them. It grows by about 1,000 people a week.
- We work with sales reps in nearly all industries and 150+ countries.
  - Note: If you’re not strictly interested in the commission-only side of what we do, our other unique value proposition is that we have reps all over the world. So, if you’re successful in the United States and want to expand fairly easily into Sweden, East Africa, etc., we have reps for that. Email GlobalExpansion@CommissionOnly.com.
To ensure the most success for companies and reps, we’ll help write your job description and give feedback on your compensation structure. We know what commission-only reps expect based on the length of the sales cycle, the complexity of the sales process, and more.
- Examples: Selling industrial cleaning services is pretty easy when you’re already in and out of factories daily, selling something else. On the other hand, selling software to school districts (tons of stakeholders, long sales cycles) is awful. Compensation will need to vary accordingly, and by now, we have a great sense of how to set comp in various situations.
Depending on the plan you choose, we’ll actively market your company to our audience, potentially increasing the number of applications by five times.

Could you source and shortlist commission-only sales reps yourself? Maybe. Sort of.

Here are your options to do this without us if that’s your jam:

Contact everyone you know to find commission-only salespeople on your own and then shortlist the best ones. You could do that, but (1) we already have relationships with more than 11,000 of them, (2) it takes a monumental effort to weed out irrelevant applications, and (3) salespeople who will work on commission with a base salary are plentiful, but salespeople who will work for commission alone are rare.
Post on every job site under the sun, but you’ll get laughed right off of them; most of them don’t offer commission-only job posts (because they don’t have a high-touch service like ours that weeds out exploitative job posts, so they just blanket disapprove all commission-only posts). If you do manage to advertise a commission-only position on a fraction of the major job sites, you’ll (1) likely spend a bundle on listing fees and (2) get a bunch of applications from unqualified people who didn’t read the commission-only portion of the job description (unlike with CommissionOnly.com, since our focus is commission-only reps).
Use a sales recruiter, but they’ll charge you 25% of the first-year compensation. We charge a low, fixed monthly fee regardless of if you hire one person or 100.

Okay, so you’re interested. Let’s set you up for success.

First, if you haven’t been able to sell your product/service yourself, stop here. We’re not for you (yet). If the founder/CEO (really, the chief salesperson at a company) can’t sell their own product/service, one of two things is happening:

You don’t have a product that resonates with an audience who can buy it. Solution: You either need (A) a product that better responds to an audience’s needs (need help solving this? Email ProductDevelopment@CommissionOnly.com), (B) a lower-priced product (need help determining pricing? Email PricingConsult@CommissionOnly.com), or (C) both.
You suck at sales (for now). If that’s the case, you need a cofounder who can sell or sales training. If you need sales training, we have people for that. Email SalesTraining@CommissionOnly.com.

If you regularly sell your product/service and you want to create an army of commission-only sales reps to sell more, here’s what to know:

Tip #1: Have a great product.

It sounds obvious, but here’s the reality…

The hardest products/services to sell are bad products in niche industries. If your product isn’t great, is commoditized and way more expensive than your competitors’ without a unique value proposition, or lacks product-market fit, this is not for you. Fix those issues first (or have our consultants fix them for you; email SaveMySales@CommissionOnly.com).
The easiest products/services to sell are great products in emerging product categories with a massive total addressable market (TAM).

Tip #2: Make sure you understand your buyers, your product/service positioning, and your market.

If the terms below are foreign to you or you haven’t fully defined them for your product/service, you have three options: (1) Don’t bother and struggle for years; (2) spend time figuring out what they mean for your business; or (3) hire our consultants to do that for you (email MarketResearch@‌CommissionOnly.com if you need help with this).

Tip #3: Offer generous compensation to commission-only reps.

Not sure what we mean by “generous” here? Just email CompConsult@Commission‌Only.com (a commission-only sales compensation consultation is free) and tell us about your product, your customer lifetime value (CLV), the average length of your sales cycle, and more. We’ll help you zero in on a commission structure that makes sense. If one doesn’t make sense (i.e., hiring sales reps isn’t the right customer acquisition strategy for you), we’ll tell you that. Great comp plans attract great reps, and great reps attract great companies, so we have a vested interest in making sure comp is aligned with reality (but also doesn’t seriously cut into your margins).

Tip #4: Be prepared to make the final hiring decisions.

We’ll drive large volumes of applications and shortlist candidates, but you ultimately need to choose your own team. These salespeople will represent your brand, so it’s crucial that, as we shortlist great people willing to work on commission, you carve out time to interview them.

Tip #5: Be prepared to train your team of commission-only sales reps and check-in with them regularly (unless you have us do all this for you).

It’s great for your bottom line that commission-only reps don’t get paid until they sell (heads up: they might be owed minimum wage or a draw against minimum wage in certain locations) but that doesn’t mean commission-only reps are without costs. The costs you’ll absorb on the frontend (besides our nearly negligible listing fee) are training time and management time.

Training needs to be repeatable, so using Loom videos or something similar is great. If you don’t already have a process for training new salespeople on (1) your product, (2) your messaging, (3) where to find prospects, and (4) rebuttals to common objections, you’ll need that. That said, you’ll need all that to build a sales team in general, regardless of if they’re commission-only or not. You can’t scale a sales team without solid training materials and processes.

Don’t have a process for onboarding sales reps?
If building a repeatable onboarding process for new sales reps is daunting, you can have us do it (email OnboardProcess@CommissionOnly.com). We’ll interview you and put the materials together (videos, one-pagers, etc.).

Don’t have the time to manage sales reps?
Maybe you have the sales rep onboarding process but you don’t have the time to handle the heavy lifting of managing reps (e.g., interviews, training, and check-ins with reps), we can do that for you (email Enterprise@CommissionOnly.com). We can also aggregate and regularly report back to you on common rebuttals reps face in new markets.

Tip #6: Determine whether or not you’ll provide leads to reps.

For the most success, you should provide leads to salespeople from the CommissionOnly.com community, who would then act strictly as closers. After you’ve trained them, they’ll close according to your script/guidelines. (Don’t have a script? Unsurprisingly, we can help with that. Email ClosingScript@CommissionOnly.com)

If you provide leads…
1. You’ll need to handle training and teach your team how to close deals.
2. You’ll need to provide sales materials, such as a one-pager and/or a PowerPoint deck. (Don't have sales collateral? We’ll create beautiful material for you. Email SalesMaterials@CommissionOnly.com)
If you don’t provide leads, you’re relying on commission-only salespeople to either (A) act as marketers to secure leads and then close them or (B) lean into their networks and pass along leads from people they’ve already sold to or otherwise know.

In case A, you can either…
Expect the commission-only rep to find the lead, perhaps warm them up, and then pass them to you to close (this is essentially “appointment setting,” which can be done via email, LinkedIn, and/or cold calling; the rep is generally paid a fixed fee per appointment booked). While the rep isn’t a closer, they help you fill your calendar with prospective client appointments. (Need appointment setters instead of salespeople? We can organize appointment setting campaigns for you; email Appointments@CommissionOnly.com)

Or...
Expect the commission-only rep to find the lead, warm them up, and then ALSO close them. Basically, you provide minimal support. This rarely works out but is possible IF the commission is huge and you provide (1) great training about the unique value proposition of your product/service and (2) marketing and sales collateral (e.g., a one-pager or a PowerPoint deck).

You made it. At this point, you have two options:

1) If you’re missing a key part of the stuff we talked about above (like product-market fit, marketing and sales collateral, pricing optimization, sales rep onboarding processes, time to manage sales reps, or more), just email SaveMySales@Commission‌Only.com, and we’ll help you solve your problems. There isn’t a sales problem we can’t help solve.