Q&A: IBM's Dupaquier On x86, SoftLayer And Moving Partners Up The Stack

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Is the pay ahead 12 months, is that the recommendation you are giving for compensating sales teams?

It depends, but pay ahead for sure. Pay ahead and take it back if for some reason the contract is canceled. Pay ahead with claw back is what we recommend because salespeople are very focused on their short-term earnings and very few of them tend to be motivated by building a three-year annuity stream. They could not care less. Especially at the business partner, they are more hunters than farmers. The problem was, for many business partners, the reason why they couldn’t get cloud revenue was because for their reps, they would rather sell a box right now rather than building a box in the cloud that will be paid over 24 months.