Nothing. Its a pretty common problem in sales. Lots of sales people are constantly moving jobs and pushing their numbers up.
HackerNews:
Wells Fargo presses sales people to fake sales: Send those executives to the guillotine! (this was literally said by a top comment on one of the threads).
Tesla presses sales people to fake numbers: Nothing to see here, standard operating procedure.
If/when these companies fold, I hope the rabid supporters are held to account.
I never has the most sales in a single month when I worked sales, but I regularly had the highest realized revenue because every single person I signed up actually wanted what they were purchasing.
I traveled around metro areas measuring signal quality, simple upgrades or maintenance, often stopping at nearby retail outlets rather than laptop in the truck.
I’d get to know the store staff and they’d talk freely around me about “fake” signups to juice numbers.
The trick was sign em up at end of month, cancel them before a bill got sent. That way the store appeared to hit their monthly target.
They’d often do fleet style signups; construction company would come in legit looking for 10 lines, the store would sign up 20 phones for construction company. Then return half before the 14-day no questions asked period.
This was going on all the time, across multiple stores, as far as I could tell. The details would change, from construction to startup or new business needing phone in a hurry.
Didn't hit numbers for the month? Buy a bunch of your own product, wait a few days until the next cycle starts, then return it all.
If I'm a salesperson looking for my next gig you're going to have to prove that you're paying a high enough commission for it to be worth it to me.
But most importantly, why would a salesperson who can make a $15k commission immediately work someplace where they need to wait for the sales and billing cycles to complete? That could easily be 30-60 days after start and will put you tens of thousands in commissions behind your competitors. And if a salesperson quits or is terminated do they still get commissions 30-60+ days in the future? Unlikely, especially if there's any bad blood.
From a business standpoint it's easier to pay on unrealized revenue and decrease the overall commission amount such that it's still profitable even when you're paying commission on money the company doesn't see.