Thanks Harry, love it! (except the "exit" part ;-)) 

Thanks John, I have no experience in raising funds and focus more on early stage B2B growth companies (vs. pre-revenue/pre-profit startups). Please see more info at... www.thefelixfun.com. 

Great, thanks for sharing Jerome!

Thanks Casey, I hadn't consciously thought about my diversity in role models/learning. I just am attracted to people who's styles resonate for me. Here's an interesting article that a friend forwarded to me this morning on the tech-flip mentality that's prevalent in silicon valley and how he's trying to buck it... http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/04/building-for-the...

Thanks Michael, learning and implementing the Theory of Constraints with you was one of the most mind expanding experiments I have participated in. Thank you for teaching me to look for what's at the core/bottleneck of what my customers experience at an unconscious level. Hope you are having fun expanding what more people can see and benefit from!!

They actually DO have a great marketing and referral system, so leads pour in independent of any sales team. The team was responding to inbound requests only (not cold calling). See my response to Kevin for more detail.

Great question, will report back in a couple months.

Ha ha, great gruesome analogy Kevin. I should have clarified (and will add to the post now), this was an INBOUND sales team. So them leaving wouldn't affect the top of the funnel. They were trying to nuture those inbound inquiries and, turns out, not adding real value. Will post back in a couple months on the progress here.

I'll also add that the reason we had these conversations to start was because RegOnline started with a similar commissioned inbound sales team. I didn't have the guts to amputate the whole team, but I did convert the team to no commission, half the cost, "Client Services" team and found better results at half the cost and none of the hassles of a commissioned team environment. We did experiment recently with SurveyGizmo leaving some of the inbound leads be untouched by a human and just get automated emails and found that human interaction DID have a significant impact on sales and justified their non-commissioned compensation.

love it!

Thanks Eric, I would love for the conversation to be a little less one-sided in this decision process of "Do I sell?"... less focused on "How much money?" and more on the real value and enjoyment that's beyond the money.