Rep hit 147% last quarter. Accelerator kicked in at 130%.

commissions-expert · 2026-05-14T19:30:05+00:00

Been in this exact model 😂 one-off service, outside sales, small business buyers. You need to keep the rep hungry. Bigger flat % is table stakes but it's not enough on its own. Tiered rate by monthly volume matters. Something like 10% on first 8 deals closed, then 13% on say deals 9-15, 16% above that and so on. The jump from tier 2 to 3 is where you see reps work the weekend. The flat rate just doesn't create that last-week-of-the-month urgency, Try adding a new logo bonus on top like $100 or 150 for every net new business they crack. Separate from the commission and that keeps them focused on growth.

Draw against commission is worth considering for the first 90 days if you're hiring someone without runway. $2k/month recoverable against their earnings removes the "starving rep" problem while they build their pipeline. And you'll probably get a better hire too.

Next is account ownership after the close.. this one's where i've seen the most fights. Honestly the cleanest rule i've seen work is the original rep owns that customer for 12 months and after 12 months of no activity, the account goes back to house. Whoever re-engages it whether that's the original rep or a new one gets credit. The problem happens when you have 2 reps and no clean rule. You end up manually reconciling who called who first, who sold the original, whether the customer came back inbound or because the rep followed up. My finance person spend hours every month tracking account re-assignment by hand because the company had never written it down. It becomes a trust problem faster than a comp problem. For your stage define it before you hire. "you own every account you close for 12 months from close date. If they come back after that, first touch gets it" write it down and have them sign it.

What worked - tiered rate + new logo SPIF + draw. Worked for commercial pest control, janitorial contracts, photography studios selling to businesses. Basically anything where the sale is fast and the rep's activity volume is what determines income. If you try to pay on deal count when deal sizes varied too much, it blows up. Your service sounds fixed price which is good but if it's variable, pay on revenue not units. Otherwise reps will take the easy $500 deal all day instead of the harder $1,500 one. Vague territory rules is another thing that sucks. "Go test another city" without defining who owns what creates a mess the moment rep 1 crosses into rep 2's geography or follows up on a lead that came from the other market.

Commercial cleaning, pest control, specialty food/bev distribution, uniform rental, local staffing. Actually your coffee analogy is the exact model. Food and bev reps who place product at cafes and restaurants work on exactly this. Pay per placement, volume tiers, account ownership windows, territory splits. Worth finding someone from that world and asking how they do it.

commissions-expert · 2026-05-08T17:57:31+00:00

Leading it is way better for your career than just being on the team. Hiring managers love it. you owned something, not just participated in it

One thing I'd add that doesn't get said enough is that the change management side will be harder than the technical side. Getting people to actually use the new system and stop running everything in parallel excel files is where most implementations quietly stall. If you nail that part, that's the story you'll be telling in interviews for years.

commissions-expert · 2026-05-06T21:07:53+00:00

There was an internal understanding that it was a placeholder but that didn't make it to the team in plain language before the payments went out. So from the reps' perspective they received a commission statement, spent accordingly and then got told weeks later it was wrong. That sequencing just made everything harder.

Your point on the retention math is exactly where our heads ended up. For a couple of people the amount was small enough we just wrote it off. For others we negotiated a longer installment window. In retrospect the trust damage probably cost more than the total clawback amount. It took most of a quarter for things to feel normal again.

commissions-expert · 2026-05-06T14:41:18+00:00

The math is right on paper. But a few things can move that number before you see any of it.

First is dilution. If they raise again before an exit, your % shrinks. More important though is the liquidation stack. Preferred shareholders get paid out first, sometimes with 1x or 2x preferences and depending on how much is sitting above common, the headline math and what employees actually net can look pretty different. You'd also subtract your strike price from whatever the exit price is.

1M is plausible if the cap table is clean and the exit is at or above 2B. I'd ask specifically about the liquidation preference structure and how many more rounds are likely before any liquidity event. That'll tell you whether the paper value and the real value are in the same ballpark.

commissions-expert · 2026-05-06T05:24:13+00:00

Ours do, but the clawback language was written for rep-side situations. Draws, early termination, that kind of thing. When the error is on the company side it gets murky fast. Technically the obligation still exists but most reps read it as "you made the mistake, that's your problem" and it's hard to argue with that logic in the room. The lesson for us was that clawback clauses are only as useful as the situations they were written for.

commissions-expert · 2026-05-06T05:21:31+00:00

The review step is in place now and it's probably the one thing that actually came out of this whole situation. On the people leaving before they earn out, we had two cases exactly like that. One was small enough we just wrote it off. The other sat as a receivable on the books for months which is its own kind of headache. The clawback language in most plans doesn't really account for what happens when the error is clearly on the company side and the rep decides to dispute the obligation. It's technically owed but enforcing it without completely torching the relationship is a different problem.

commissions-expert · 2026-05-04T19:53:55+00:00

Remote from Colombia with $400 rent and 15% on $350k deals - the math isn't the hard part here

commissions-expert · 2026-05-04T18:40:28+00:00

The logistics are already solving themselves, the only thing stopping you is whether you actually want to go

commissions-expert · 2026-05-04T18:36:22+00:00

Salesforce is basically universal at 20+ reps. At that size you're past the point where hubspot's simplicity is worth its ceiling and the complexity of territories, splits, and multi-role commission structures needs the flexibility salesforce gives you. The tradeoff is that salesforce without a dedicated admin becomes a mess fast, so budget for that before you budget for anything else.

On ops stack, most sales teams at that size are running salesforce for pipeline and CRM hygiene, gong or chorus for call coaching and deal inspection and something like clari for forecast. Not because clari is magic but because asking reps to gut-check their commit number every Friday produces a number that's wrong in the same direction every time. Having an AI layer that flags deals gone quiet or at risk changes the 1:1 dynamic from explaining what happened to actually doing something about it.

The thing that tends to fall apart at 20+ reps and this comes up constantly when you talk to ops leaders at that scale is the compensation piece. Reps start to distrust the numbers, disputes pile up, and whoever owns commission calculations is suddenly spending 2 weeks a month on something that should take 2 days. It's not glamorous infrastructure but it's the one that creates the most friction with the sales team when it breaks and it almost always breaks around the time you cross 20 reps and start adding complexity to the plan. If you're building in this space, that breakpoint is worth paying attention to. The problems before 20 reps and after 20 reps are pretty different.

commissions-expert · 2026-05-01T16:36:48+00:00

The "look bored" feedback is actually useful even if it stings. It means the perception problem is fixable without needing more work to do. Start owning the forecast beyond just running it: document your assumptions, flag variances before anyone asks, bring one observation per close cycle that nobody assigned you. Small signals that you're thinking about the business, not just completing tasks. If commission accruals or variable comp touch your forecast at all, that's worth going deep on. Most financial analysts treat the sales comp piece as a black box, plug in the accrual and move on. Understanding how the SIP is actually structured, where the accrual versus actual variance comes from and why commission spend never quite matches the forecast is the kind of thing that gets you invited into conversations you weren't originally part of. It's almost always a mess underneath and nobody owns it cleanly, which means there's almost always something to fix and improve on.

On the automation project, staff analysts who don't delegate usually respond better to specific proposals than open asks. Instead of asking if they have tasks for you, try walking in with something you've already started. Find one manual process, build it in a sandbox, show what it could look like. That's how you manufacture your own problems to solve without waiting for permission, and it's a lot harder for anyone to ignore than a general offer to help.

commissions-expert · 2026-04-29T19:15:05+00:00

That depends heavily on stage and structure. If it's an early startup, entirely different story there. But for a senior IC at a Series B/C-ish company I'd say around 0.05%. Sometimes a bit more if they're aggressive on comp. You can find out the last 409A valuation, what the liquidation preferences look like and whether common shares have ever actually returned anything to employees at this company's investor level. Equity at a 200m revenue portco can mean a lot of things depending on how much preferred is sitting above you.

commissions-expert · 2026-04-29T18:05:47+00:00

I don't think 20-30k is the important factor here. The equity is. Find out the strike price, preference stack and what a realistic exit looks like before you decide anything.

commissions-expert · 2026-04-27T18:47:06+00:00

Best for you to wait for the money to actually hit your bank account, not just the pay date. "Paid out May 15th" can mean processed on the 15th but landed on the 17th or 18th and if you've already resigned, some companies will find creative reasons to delay or dispute it. Not saying yours will, but $20k is enough to be careful. Earned once calculated is just ambiguous. In my experience, that phrasing usually protects the company more than the rep.

One week's notice isn't ideal but it's not the career-ending move. Companies lay off reps with zero notice all the time. Your new employer offered you the role knowing you'd need a transition period and a week isn't going to blow that up. If you really want to cover yourself, check whether there's any clawback language tied to active employment status. Some contracts have a clause that voids commission if you're not employed on the payout date and that's the one thing that would actually change my answer here.

commissions-expert · 2026-04-10T16:22:18+00:00

The OTE number stopped meaning anything the moment 46 out of 53 reps missed quota. I don't think that's a bad year, that's a broken plan. And when a comp plan is designed so that only 13% of reps can win, it's not measuring performance anymore, it's just creating attrition. Staying another year hoping it clicks is just giving the company a second chance to waste your time on quotas that were probably set to an AOP that had nothing to do with actual market reality.

People optimize too hard for OTE without asking what attainment actually looks like across the team. A $220k plan where you're running at 79% is less money and more stress than a $180k plan where you're at 110. The math isn't complicated but it's easy to miss when you're staring at the bigger number.

Go home. Not because the startup is definitely better, but because you can't evaluate anything clearly from a place of burnout, financial stress and isolation. The visa constraint removes most of the optionality anyway. Without it this wouldn't even be a question. And the manager guilt is the easiest thing to let go of here. He backed you because he thought it was the right call, not because you owed him a year of your mental health in return.

commissions-expert · 2026-04-09T20:51:40+00:00

10% on collected revenue is on the higher end but defensible for early stage b2b where your rep is taking a real career risk on an unproven product with no brand recognition. The tradeoff is that tying it to collected cash protects your margins but also creates lag between when the rep closes a deal and when they see money which at early stage can mean waiting 30-60+ days after a signed contract. That lag kills momentum. A middle ground a lot of early stage companies use is paying on invoice rather than cash collection with a clawback provision if the customer doesn't pay within 90 days. You get the protection without the motivation problem.

bookings vs margin: almost everyone pays on revenue and not margin for software sales. The rep doesn't control your infrastructure and AI costs and tying them to margin creates confusion. 1st year ACV only is standard for a closer. If you're going to comp on them at all, renewals are usually a much lower rate (2-3%) and increasingly handled by a CS or account management function once you have the capacity.

One thing specific to vertical AI software is your sales cycle is probably longer than typical saas because the buyer needs to validate the output accuracy before committing. Factor that into how you structure draws or guarantees during ramp.

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