Need help pulling salesperson commission information from a central data sheet.

I am trying to simplfy the internal managment reporting at my company and I need a little guidance. My plan is to have one central data sheet that includes all of the information needed to build subsequent worksheet which can be accessed by managment. I am running into problems with the salesperson compensation reports. I would like to be able to pull specific information that is in a row, based on the salesersons name listed in a column. It looks something like this.

NAME------------COMMISSION
john-------------------100
mary-------------------125
jill----------------------75
jack--------------------95
So everytime a deal is made by john, and entered into the data sheet, I would like another workbook to recognize the word "john" from the salesperson column and pull the commision info. I know how to link sheets and workbooks, that's not the problem. I am also familiar with the sumifs function, but that function totals all of the row info for the specific criteria in a column. I just want info in a row specified by the criteria "john" in the salesperson column to be copied and then pasted into a seperate workbook. Is this possible?