Incentives and Commission | That's the best part of Sales! | Sawan Kumar - Online Motivational Coach

If the words incentives and commission in sales make your stomach drop, you are not a salesperson yet — and that single fear is the exact thing keeping your income capped. Master the relationship with these two words and you stop chasing a fixed paycheck and start building a life where every conversation pays you back.

Direct Answer: Incentives and commission in sales are not just cash bonuses tied to a quota — they are the universal reward system for any successful persuasion, whether it is closing a customer, getting your child to listen, your spouse agreeing with you, your bank approving a loan at the rate you wanted, or your landlord giving you the rent you negotiated. True salespeople love these words because that is where the money and the life actually are; pseudo-salespeople fear them because they have never trained the skill.

Why Pseudo-Salespeople Fear the Word "Commission"

I have trained over 79,000 students across 74+ courses from my base in Dubai, and the single biggest psychological block I see in people who call themselves salesmen is this: they freeze at the word commission. They want the title without the variable pay. A true salesperson — the kind who actually moves product and builds wealth — does the opposite. They hunt for commission structures because that is the only ceiling-free compensation model that exists.

The pseudo-salesperson wants a flat number. The real salesperson wants a percentage of the outcome they create. That one mindset gap is what separates a person earning a capped salary from someone whose income compounds month after month.

Incentives Do Not Always Come as Money

Here is the part most people miss completely. Incentives and commission show up in your life in shapes that have nothing to do with a bank deposit:

• Your child listening to you is the incentive you earn for selling your idea to them.
• Your spouse agreeing to what you wanted is the commission on a personal sale you just closed.
• Your bank approving a loan at the interest rate you negotiated is the payout for the sales pitch you made to the loan officer.
• Your landlord giving you the property at the rent you wanted is the commission you earned for negotiating well.

You are already collecting incentives and commission in sales every single day. You just have not been counting them. The currency is sometimes rupees or dollars, sometimes it is compliance, sometimes it is trust, sometimes it is a yes — but every meaningful win in your life was a sale, and every sale paid you in some form.

The Myth of the "Fixed Salary"

Let me kill the comfort blanket most employees hide behind. There is no such thing as a fixed salary. Stop performing for two months and watch what happens — that fixed number disappears and you are thrown out of the organization. The number at the end of the month only looks fixed because you have been performing consistently enough to keep it appearing on schedule.

That means even a salaried job is, in reality, a variable commission structure with a delayed feedback loop. The day your performance drops, the "fixed" salary stops being fixed. Once you accept that, the fear of commission disappears, because you realise you were already on commission — you just had a worse contract than the people who negotiated a percentage.

Incentives Are the Building Blocks of Your Life

Look back at every moment that made you happy, sad, successful, or proud. Each one was an incentive earned or lost. The promotion, the spouse, the home, the child's respect, the friend who shows up — these are all commissions on sales you made along the way, often without knowing you were selling.

The shift happens when you start collecting them knowingly. If unconsciously playing this game gets most people to a decent life, imagine what happens when you consciously train the skill, study it, practice it, and deploy it with intent. That is the gap between "getting by" and building something that compounds.

How to Start Treating Sales as a Trainable Skill

As a Chartered Accountant by training, I am wired to look at this analytically. Sales is not a personality trait — it is a skill stack with repeatable inputs and measurable outputs. Here is the sequence I teach:

• Learn the skill — study persuasion, objection handling, and the structure of a real close.
• Collect the skill — log what worked in every interaction, from a client call to a conversation with your kid.
• Generate everything you can — pitches, scripts, frameworks, follow-up sequences.
• Go out and collect incentives — apply the skill in revenue contexts where the commission is denominated in money.
• Practice to mastery — repeat the loop until selling feels like breathing.

Nothing on this earth can stop you from becoming the greatest version of yourself — the greatest businessperson or the greatest person possible — if you master this one skill of sales. That is not motivational filler; it is the observed pattern across every wealthy operator I have studied or trained.

Reframe Commission as Freedom, Not Risk

The fear of commission is really a fear of being measured. A salaried employee gets to hide inside an average. A commissioned salesperson cannot. Their output is visible every week. That visibility feels like risk if you are weak at the skill, and it feels like freedom the moment you are strong at it — because now your income tracks your effort with no ceiling and no permission required.

Reframe it this way: a fixed salary is a cap. A commission structure is a launchpad. Same effort, different ceiling.

Stop being afraid of incentives and commission in sales — they are the architecture of every good outcome in your life. Your next step today: pick one upcoming conversation (a client pitch, a negotiation with a vendor, even a request to your spouse), write down the "sale" you are trying to make and the specific "commission" you want in return, and run the conversation like a trained salesperson instead of a passive participant.