Items or insights?

"To the surprise of many, these firms are showing that commissions can sometimes do more harm than good—and that getting rid of them can open a path to higher profits.
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contingent rewards—I call them “if then” rewards, as in “If you do this, then you get that”—work well with routine tasks social scientists dub “algorithmic.” Think stuffing envelopes quickly or turning the same screw the same way on an assembly line. The promise of a reward, especially cash, excites our attention, and we focus narrowly on getting the job done.
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However, those same if-then rewards turn out to be far less effective for complex, creative, conceptual endeavors—what psychologists call “heuristic” work.
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That leads us back to sales. In the middle of the last century, selling was fairly simple. Memorize your script, open your sample case a certain way, fire back standard responses to predictable objections—and do it over and over again until the law of averages works in your favor.
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Today, though, the transactional aspects of sales are disappearing. When routine functions can be automated, and when customers and prospects often have as much data as the saleswoman herself, the skills that matter most are heuristic: Curating and interpreting information instead of merely dispensing it. Identifying new problems along with solving established ones. Selling insights rather than items.
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Should every company forswear sales commissions? No. But simply challenging this orthodoxy helps us recognize that selling today is sophisticated, complex work—and that the people doing it therefore require incentives beyond a dangled carrot."

E recordo a diferença entre vendedores e consultores de compra.
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Trechos retirados de "A Radical Prescription for Sales" de Daniel H. Pink