#241 2014 · Huawei · Telecommunications equipment / B2B salesreframe
Huawei called individual sales commissions 'poison' and paid the whole deal team instead of whoever signed
the problem
A commission paid to the individual who closes a deal rewards exactly one role in a sale that actually required many, so the people whose work made the win possible — engineers, account managers, technical support — have no financial stake in a win the closer takes full credit and pay for
background
Standard enterprise sales compensation pays individual commission to the salesperson who signs a contract, a structure carried over from simpler transactional selling where one person genuinely does most of the work of winning a customer. Complex B2B deals — the kind Huawei pursues with telecom carriers and large enterprises, worth tens of millions to over a hundred million yuan — require a coordinated team: engineers scoping technical requirements, account managers maintaining the relationship, solution architects designing the deal, alongside whoever ultimately signs it. Individual commission on that kind of sale rewards the person whose name is on the contract while leaving the people who actually built the technical and relationship groundwork with no direct financial stake in the outcome, pushing salespeople toward optimizing personal credit-taking over team coordination on exactly the deals that most require it.
Huawei began rolling out '获取分享制' ('acquire-and-share system') from 2011, abolishing individual sales commission and replacing it with a shared compensation pool tied to a business unit's actual profit, revenue, and cash collection. In September 2014, founder Ren Zhengfei formalized the policy at an internal incentive-principles briefing, declaring that acquire-and-share 'should become the company's basic concept for value distribution' — elevating what had been a sales-department practice into company-wide compensation philosophy, and describing individual commission as 'poison' for this kind of business.
the move
Rather than pay the closer, Huawei calculates a compensation pool ('粮食包', literally 'grain package') from the actual business results — revenue, profit, and collected payment — a business unit or project team generated, then distributes that pool across the full team responsible for the win, aligning every role's financial incentive with team-level project success rather than individual deal attribution.
the payoff
Ren Zhengfei credited the system directly in his 2014 remarks: 'once acquire-and-share appeared, profit grew very quickly these past two years, and everyone's motivation and drive picked up' — the policy is described in internal accounts as coinciding with accelerated profit growth during a period when Huawei had been contending with slowing growth after missing earlier internet-era strategic opportunities between 2003 and 2011.
what came after
获取分享制 is extensively studied in Chinese management and HR literature as a core structural element of Huawei's compensation philosophy, distinct from and frequently contrasted with both flat salary and individual-commission models, and is cited as a template for aligning incentives in any complex, team-dependent B2B sales organization.
references
- [1]腾讯新闻 (Tencent News) — 提成制是一种"毒药"！华为用获取分享制牵引团队作战Tencent News, 2024view.inews.qq.com
- [2]新浪财经 (Sina Finance) — 华为采用获取分享制，为什么不用提成制？Sina Finance, 2025finance.sina.com.cn