I often deal with small companies who are dealing with structuring the right sales compensation programs for their sales people. On one hand they want to provide a lot of incentive on the other they do not want the sales person making more than the owner (which I do not agree with by the way)

What have you done in the past? What works? What doesnt? Any suggestions?

We have a sales program that works pretty well - at least as good as can be expected. It is divided into thirds:

1/3 - how the company has performed overall
1/3 - personal sales
1/3 - team sales

We always hear complaints that we should change the 1/3 around but it is never consistant so we think we have it about right.

We pay them a base salary that they draw on and then pay them commission on the products they sell.

We do not have sales people - we ask all employees to act as salespeople and we give them a 20% referral fee on all contracts that we receive

We align our salespeoples comp based on the services that we would like to market paying a higher amount for a higher margin project versus a competive low margin product.