Huawei replaced sales commissions with team profit-sharing

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.

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.

Replaced individual commissions with a team profit pool based on actual results, distributed across all roles, aligning everyone's pay with collective success.

Individual commission gives only the signer a stake, so other contributors lack motivation.

Team-level pool ties everyone's pay to the same outcome, encouraging coordination.

Pool based on profit and cash collection rewards real value, not just signing.

Shared rewards reduce credit-taking and internal competition, improving collaboration.

When a win truly depends on many roles, pay the team, not the closer, to align incentives with how value is actually created.

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.