Hey 'ski. Looks like I'm doing a good job, and my company wants to keep me. Got a review last week that went into detail about the work I do (writing sales proposals) and my win rate, which is only about 19-23%. When I walked into the meeting, I figured I had a 50/50 chance of keeping/losing my job, right there and then. Turns out my efforts will be worth about $1.2m in new business to the company this year. That makes me feel MUCH more comfortable about whether I am paying for myself, and whether it makes sense for the company to keep paying me. The most important thing I learned in the meeting was that the sales proposal work I do is seen as less valuable than the other stuff I do... competitive research and analysis, writing market positioning documents, providing insights into the customer needs in two of our key vertical markets, etc. So yeah! I went from, "OMG, I'm about to get fired." to "I am paying for myself, and providing significant additional value, too!" It feels good. And once Q4/2017 is complete and the numbers are in, I can plan for a large raise on my 2nd anniversary here in April 2018. whew! Now back to planning our honeymoon in the UK...
Friend of mine was an agent at one of the Big Three. He represented gaming companies. I asked him how many deals he'd done in the past year. "One," he said. He was always jumpy. I commiserated with him. How many would he do this year? "All I need is one," he said. The last client he'd landed was Bungie.
An old girlfriend is a real estate agent. In Marin County, CA. I haven't seen her sell any place for less than $1.5m. In my head, I make sure to keep that sale price number locked in a mental room far, far away from the formula that calculates a real estate agent's commission, because I really just don't wanna know... She sells a house every 6 weeks or so.