For sure, I've never done the commission thing so I'm unfamiliar with how the specifics work. 12 months feels like a large window for a clawback.

agreed, that does seem really long, especially since the account executives are handing off their clients to customer success.

I think a clawback makes a lot of sense. Otherwise you are basically incentivizing your sales team to sell to people who aren't a good fit for your product.

Is there some sort of "industry standard" for clawback length? I understand the incentive it's putting in place, but after a point the sales team is pretty disassociated from the customer.

For instance, what if you're a Zenefits salesperson who closed an account 6 months ago before their compliance issues hit headlines. If that customer then cancels based on the news, will the commission be clawed back?

There are in more well-defined industries (e.g, media) and salespeople understand and value them- they would definitely consider this important to their overall package. There's more of an issue when the industry isn't well defined (like this "new benefits" industry is not), or salespeople don't have experience to know any better or ability to impact the retention of a client.

Would that typically be spelled out in the terms for their commission structure? While the ability to retain the customers may have underperformed expectations, the risk of having that money be clawed back shouldn't have been a surprise, right?