Losing a big commission to a clawback clause

Published: Wed, 11/26/25

Updated: Sun, 11/30/25

November 26, 2025

TOGETHER WITH

Welcome back to The Quota. As you get ready to eat your body weight in stuffing and treats, remember to give thanks to the prospects who signed their contracts this year, and to the commission checks that make this crazy game worthwhile. But before you check out physically (we know you’ve already checked out mentally) take a look at this week’s newsletter—a cornucopia of sales fun. Enjoy!

NUMBER OF THE WEEK

112.6

Text message follow-ups have an 112.6 higher conversion rate than other methods.

Source: Flowlu

SALES ROUNDUP

Here’s what’s happening in the sales world this week:

Apple said on Monday it’s cutting jobs across its sales teams to strengthen its customer engagement efforts. An Apple spokesperson told Reuters that the company is continuing to hire and the affected employees can apply for new roles. The impacted employees include account managers serving major businesses, and school and government agencies, according to Bloomberg News, which had reported the news earlier in the day. You can read more about it here.
One of the most famous TV pitchmen of all time, the ShamWow guy, is running for political office (because that’s just what we need right now…) Offer Vince Shlomi, a former fixture on American infomercials where he hawked “ShamWow” towels, which he touted for their absorbency and ability to be used on different surfaces, is running for Texas’s 31st Congressional District, currently represented by GOP Rep. John Carter. We’re sure his ads will be entertaining at least. You can read more about it here.

FEATURE

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Unofficial History of GTM Titles

If you opened a sales org chart in the 1950s, you wouldn’t find a single AE, SDR, CSM, or CRO. Selling looked different then. Reps carried leather sample cases, memorized scripts, and drove long loops across their territory shaking hands with customers who bought hardware, telecom systems, and office machines in person.

But inside early companies like IBM and Xerox, something new was forming. They were inventing the structure every modern GTM team now relies on. Titles we take for granted today didn’t appear overnight. They stacked on top of one another across seventy years of business trends, technology shifts, and revenue experiments.

This is the origin story behind them.

When Corporate America Needed a Field Army (1950s–60s)

IBM was one of the earliest companies to treat selling as a formal discipline. A Territory Representative was the company’s foot soldier, responsible for a geographic region, not a vertical. Sales Engineers became common as products grew more technical.

Xerox took the same approach as it scaled the copier business. District Manager, Major Accounts Representative, and Systems Specialist showed up on business cards as the company expanded into hospitals, law firms, and universities.

By the end of the 1960s, the basic hierarchy of enterprise selling was already in place. There was the rep, the specialist, and the manager. Titles became a way to project professionalism in an era where the traveling salesperson stereotype still loomed large.

The AE Becomes a Star (1970s–80s)

The shift from electromechanical products to computing changed everything. Selling wasn’t about dropping off brochures anymore — it required technical fluency, problem-solving, and long sales cycles.

That’s when the Account Executive stepped into the spotlight.

AEs in the 1970s and 80s worked multi-month, sometimes multi-year deals for minicomputers, networks, and software systems. They ran on-site demos, navigated procurement boards, built formal proposals, and coached executives through the adoption of technology most people had never touched.

This era gave the AE its identity as the “quarterback” of the deal. Reps weren’t pitching features; they were consultants. The title stuck because it captured something important: selling had become strategic. The “executive” title looked good on a business card and gave sellers the prestige (and confidence) they needed to sell to real executives.

The Inside Sales Revolution (1990s–2000s)

Then came CRM.

As companies adopted digital databases for leads and customer relationships, they discovered something: not every salesperson needed to be on the road. For the first time, reps could qualify prospects, log conversations, and route leads without leaving a desk. This sparked a wave of new titles like the Inside Sales Rep for high-velocity calling, the Lead Development Rep for early qualification, Business Development Rep for outbound, and the Account Manager for renewals and relationship management.

It was the first major structural split in modern sales: the hunters and the farmers, the outbound specialists and the closers. Companies realized you could make closing roles more efficient by removing prospecting from their plates.

2011: The SDR/BDR Model Goes Mainstream

The tipping point came when Salesforce formally separated prospecting from closing and published the playbook.

Aaron Ross’ Predictable Revenue described how Salesforce used inbound SDRs to qualify hand-raisers and outbound SDRs to hunt greenfield accounts, while AEs handled demos and closing. The model worked so well that companies copied it wholesale.

Within a few years, “SDR” and “BDR” went from niche acronyms to almost mandatory roles in any tech company with a quota. Entire career ladders formed around them.

The modern sales assembly line — SDR → AE → CSM — was born.

When software moved to subscriptions, something subtle but important happened: the moment a deal closed was no longer the end of the journey. It was the beginning of a revenue relationship companies needed to protect.

Enter Customer Success Managers.

CSMs emerged to reduce churn, drive adoption, and expand accounts over time. For the first time, a sales-adjacent title existed with a mandate that wasn’t quota-first. Instead, it was customer-first, renewal-first, relationship-first.

Companies like Gainsight championed the discipline publicly. Industry groups formalized best practices. CSM became a standard pillar of any recurring revenue motion.

The CRO and RevOps Era (Late 2010s–Present)

As SaaS selling became more complex, executives realized the entire revenue engine needed orchestration.

That’s when the Chief Revenue Officer emerged, consolidating sales, marketing, and customer success leadership under a single owner of revenue.

Shortly after, Revenue Operations rose in prominence. RevOps became the glue that connected CRM systems, forecasting, enablement, compensation design, and GTM data.

Suddenly, job titles like: Director of RevOps, VP of GTM Strategy, Sales Enablement Manager were showing up everywhere.

The Org Chart Is a Story

Every GTM title we use today carries the fingerprint of a different decade:

Territory reps from the IBM era.
AEs from the rise of complex enterprise technology.
SDRs/BDRs from Salesforce’s 2011 playbook.
CSMs from SaaS economics.
CROs and RevOps from the need to unify the entire funnel.

AI Sales Prompting Cheat Sheet

Most teams settle for “write a follow-up email.” The best teams go further.
This cheat sheet will show you how to get responses with persona-based prompts built for sales.

You’ll learn the five key techniques elite teams use to guide AI, from role-based frameworks for outreach and enablement to iterative prompting chains that handle objections.

You’ll also see how to structure prompts that surface deal risk and tailor your messaging, turning AI into a true sales accelerator.

Stop treating AI like a gimmick. Learn how to make it your sales rep’s superpower.

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Download for free!

MEME OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram -- Sales Humor

QUIZ

Approximately how many new vehicles are sold in the U.S. each year?

A. 38 million
B. 14 million
C. 16 million
D. 8 million

SALES FAILS

Each week, we bring you the most cringe-worthy sales moments from across the web. To submit your sales fail story for consideration, click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

I sell logistics software to mid-size businesses. There was a key target account I was trying to book a meeting with. I decided to launch a two-pronged outreach: one email to a junior contact I hoped could become a champion, and another to the decision maker. It was a strategy that had worked for me before. I thought it was clever. I sent them emails expecting to maybe get a reply within a day or two.

Twenty minutes later the backfire hit. The decision maker replied curtly that there was no way they’d do business with someone who couldn't be bothered to do personalized outreach. The junior person had apparently forwarded my version of the email to his boss telling him it might be an interesting opportunity. But the decision maker felt that him getting a similar message the same day was a spam campaign.

I tried the polite reset: owning the mistake, apologizing, promising to do better. Nobody replied. I still do this strategy (and it still works) but I now make sure to stagger the outreach between contacts at the same company.

Anonymous Location Withheld

GRAPH OF THE WEEK

Source: LinkedIn Poll -- November 2025

WORTH A PEEK

Will the sales job market bounce back, or is this the new normal? A recent Reddit post argued that the market will never go back to the heyday of 2021. Some agreed, some disagreed, and others offered advice on how to succeed regardless. Check out the conversation here.

ASK THE QUOTA

Want to submit a question and be featured in our advice column? Click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

Dear Quota Team,

I’m an AE at a mid-sized SaaS company. I closed one of the biggest deals of my career, a mid-six-figure contract I worked for months, and got the commission. There's a 90-day clawback clause on commissions. I’ve always thought it was annoying but fair… mostly because it never happened to me. Then, right before the 90-day mark, the client canceled. Not because of anything I did, but because implementation dropped the ball. Missed deadlines, poor communication, the whole thing unraveled.

Now, finance says I owe back every dollar of that commission. It’s a huge hit, and what bothers me most is that leadership keeps insisting “we win and lose as a team,” yet I feel like I'm the one taking the loss. My base comp is low—I live off my commissions.

I don’t want to come off entitled or like I’m blaming other departments, but this feels fundamentally unfair. Is there anything I can do?

Burned in Location Withheld

Dear Burned,

It's unlikely you'll be able to keep any of the commission if the contracts are written that way. You could offer to be more involved in hand-off and implementation for the first 90 days of new contracts to help ensure everything goes smoothly so this doesn't happen again. But if you don't want to do that, you have two choices: accept it and move on or look for a new job with a company that's better at retaining the customers. Good luck!

Quiz Answer: C. Approximately 16m new vehicles are sold in the U.S. each year (You can read the source article here).

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Today's email was written by Ken Kupchik, Erica Furgiuele, Steve Rado, and Emily Hill.

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