For many, sales compensation planning season follows the same rut. We start out believing the plan will actually drive behavior. And then, more often than not, it delivers the same results as last year.
According to QuotaPath's RevView benchmark report, average quota attainment across B2B sales teams sits in the 40–60% range. It’s not that every organization doesn’t invest in trying to hit its goals. Those investments are counterbalanced by comp plans that are too complex to trust, too misaligned to motivate, and too inflexible to adapt.
In a recent RevOps Co-op webinar, Matthew Volm sat down with Ryan Milligan, Chief Revenue Officer at QuotaPath, Brandon Smith, Director of Revenue Operations at QuotaPath, and Meghan Crosby, a finance and sales comp practitioner at LucidLink with nearly a decade of experience, to walk through what makes comp plans fail, how to diagnose weaknesses in an existing plan, and the principles that separate performance-driving plans from ones that just pay people for showing up.
The session opened with a live poll on average quota attainment, and the results aligned almost exactly with what QuotaPath's broader data shows: a wide distribution across the room, with most respondents falling below the 80% attainment threshold that teams are typically trying to reach.
The most underappreciated problem with comp plan failure isn't the commission dollars — it's the compounding cost of carrying a demoralized sales team. When attainment is consistently low, the damage is visible only partially in the numbers. The rest shows up in rep disengagement, degraded pipeline quality, and the enablement overhead of supporting a team that isn't performing.
As Ryan Milligan framed it early in the session, the question isn't just "why aren't reps hitting quota?" — it's "what is this costing us across every person we're paying to support them?"
"People don't tend to think about the negative implications of having a demotivated and demoralized team not hitting their number, but also all of the costs you're paying from an enablement and support perspective across those sellers." — Ryan Milligan
This is the framing that makes comp plan design a RevOps conversation, not just a finance conversation. Sales compensation connects directly to pipeline health, forecast reliability, and the operational levers RevOps controls. Getting it wrong doesn't just mean unhappy reps — it means an organization building on a broken foundation.
Milligan outlined the most common patterns he sees when comp plans stop driving behavior. They cluster around four failure modes:
Too many metrics. Plans that try to motivate everything end up motivating nothing. When commission components span long-term contracts, cash collection, multiple products, testimonials, and NPS scores simultaneously, no single component is weighted heavily enough to change behavior. Reps learn to ignore the incentives they can't control and focus on whatever closes fastest.
Misaligned incentives. This is perhaps the most operationally damaging failure mode — the plan is designed with good intentions, but the math works out to reward the wrong behavior. Milligan cited a specific example: a company couldn't understand why reps consistently avoided closing long-term contracts. When they modeled the commission math, the answer was obvious — a shorter, full-price contract paid the rep more than a discounted multi-year deal. The incentive was pointing directly away from what the business needed.
Pay mix mismatched to scope of control. When variable compensation is tied to outcomes a rep can't meaningfully influence — a CSM comped on retention that occurs 18 months post-implementation, for instance — the result isn't motivation; it's resentment. Reps feel penalized for things outside their control, which erodes trust faster than almost anything else.
Weak thresholds and quota periods. Plans with annual or semi-annual quotas on short sales cycles strip out the urgency that drives deal pull-forward behavior. If a rep closes 15 deals per quarter but carries an annual quota, there's no weekly or monthly ratchet creating pressure to act now.
Understanding which of these failure modes is active in a given plan is the starting point for redesign. As Meghan Crosby noted, the most consistent failure she has observed across organizations is straightforward:
"The thing I have seen the most frequently is an overly complex comp plan. It can overall just become a distraction to the field, and it can erode that trust and create some confusion. So eliminating any noise is best, and a simple comp plan is the way to go, 100%." — Meghan Crosby
Before redesigning a plan, Milligan recommended scoring the existing plan against three diagnostic questions. The questions are deceptively simple, but each one surfaces a distinct category of structural failure:
Does the plan align with your company's best interests? Not all closed business is equal. A logo that churns in 90 days, a deeply discounted one-year deal from a non-ICP account, and a three-year prepaid contract from a Fortune 500 reference customer may all count the same in a basic commission structure — but they have wildly different value to the business. If the plan doesn't differentiate between them, it's treating great deals and mediocre ones identically.
Does the plan create urgency to hit quota? Urgency depends on quota period design. Milligan's rule of thumb: set the quota period to the shortest interval in which a rep could reasonably complete five transactions. This creates momentum without setting up failure due to an insufficient sample size.
Is the plan simple enough to be understood and trusted? This is the dimension where the panel spent the most time — and where, as Milligan noted, most organizations score lowest. The standard he set is demanding but clear: a rep should be able to explain, in real time while working a deal, exactly what they'll earn if they change one parameter. Commission structures with stacked multipliers — where rates are adjusted by 80% if one condition applies, then by 110% if another applies, then by 90% if a third applies — fail this test completely.
Brandon Smith added a dimension that's easy to overlook: the trust problem isn't just rep-to-company. It's also rep-to-manager. If managers can't fluently explain the plan when reps bring questions, the breakdown happens at the first line of communication — and RevOps ends up fielding a flood of individual inquiries that should have been handled by the people closest to the reps.
"Making sure the managers are also on board with that, and being able to enable the managers to speak to the plans, because they tend to be the first line of people that end up fielding questions on comp." — Brandon Smith
The session's middle section addressed specific structural principles for plan design. The most practically actionable was the principle of driver narrowing: limit active incentive drivers to one or two beyond the base quota component.
The logic is straightforward. A base commission rate tied to quota retirement gives reps a clear foundation. One or two rate modifiers — tied to deal parameters that are actually within the rep's influence — gives them meaningful levers to pull. Stack more than that, and the plan starts to feel like it's designed to confuse rather than motivate.
Milligan's recommended range for pay mix in a standard account executive role sits close to 50/50 base and variable, reflecting the significant influence reps have over closing outcomes. For SDRs and BDRs, where outcomes like demos booked and pipeline generated are less purely within individual control, the variable component is typically weighted lower. For CSMs, where renewal timing is often driven by customer adoption cycles outside the rep's immediate control, the same logic applies.
On drivers specifically, all three panelists shared examples that have worked:
The spiffs conversation connected to this directly. QuotaPath's internal practice is to run a maximum of one or two spiffs simultaneously, keep them short and intensely focused, and then, if behavior changes, absorb the mechanic into the base plan rather than running the spiff indefinitely.
Milligan described a specific example from QuotaPath's own sales team that illustrates how this can work at scale:
"We jumped from, in that quarter, 15% of our new business contracts in multi-year to, like, 85% in a quarter because the reps were very motivated by that change. And then we could ramp that accelerator down over time and build it into kind of, like, the base accelerator set." — Ryan Milligan
One of the session's more nuanced discussions was prompted by an attendee question about comping marketing and sales teams that share pipeline attribution. The challenge is familiar: if attribution is imperfect — and it almost always is — how do you set shared goals that feel fair to both teams?
Smith described QuotaPath's current structure as a useful model. The marketing team's variable compensation is split roughly 50/50 between demo-occurred pipeline (a quality-gated metric that filters out phantom pipeline) and closed-won new business revenue — the same target that the sales team is working toward. The result is two teams oriented toward the same downstream outcome without the finger-pointing that tends to emerge when marketing is comped purely on pipeline volume.
The learning that led to this design was instructive. When the marketing team was comped on raw pipeline generated, the incentive was to book as many demos as possible regardless of show rate or qualification quality. Show rates suffered, and the sales team bore the consequences.
"We used to comp the marketing team on pipeline generated, but then we would have a lot of people motivating towards booking demos that never actually happened or didn't have a quality metric. So we would push for a lot of demos that just wouldn't actually pan out." — Ryan Milligan
The principle this surfaces for RevOps: when comping adjacent teams on shared pipeline goals, identify the quality gate that filters out gaming behavior. Demo occurred, qualified opportunity, or opportunity with a specific minimum value threshold — the exact metric matters less than the fact that it's difficult to manufacture without real buyer engagement. This connects directly to the broader challenge of designing lead lifecycle stages that create clean handoffs between teams.
One of the most direct pieces of advice in the session was directed specifically at RevOps practitioners who want to expand their strategic influence. Milligan's argument was simple: comp plan design is one of the highest-leverage strategic conversations in any revenue organization, and RevOps is uniquely positioned to lead it.
"When RevOps leaders ask me, 'How do I get more strategic?' I say, 'Design the comp plans.' It's a perfect thing to run business strategy." — Ryan Milligan
The process he described follows a triangle of influence: revenue leader, finance leader, and RevOps. RevOps functions as the connective tissue — gathering rep feedback through direct interviews, surfacing cost thresholds from finance, understanding the CRO's priorities for the coming year, and synthesizing all three inputs into a set of design proposals that the full triangle can react to.
The rep interview step is the one most frequently skipped, and Milligan made a case for it being non-negotiable. When reps are going to experience a comp change — especially one that raises quotas or changes the structure they've been working with — understanding their current frustrations and their concept of "great" gives RevOps real currency to negotiate with.
"If you can give them a couple gives as you do something like raising quotas, you can drive a lot more of that trust and engagement as well." — Ryan Milligan
Crosby echoed this from a change management perspective, noting that early previews to sales leaders — even when those leaders aren't final decision-makers — create the buy-in that makes plan rollouts land cleanly rather than generating resistance at the manager layer. Change management in RevOps is notoriously undervalued, and comp planning is one of the highest-stakes moments for it.
Brandon Smith added that the comp planning process itself — when done well — is a four-to-six week effort, and that "Comptober" (QuotaPath's term for October planning season) is genuinely the right window to start. The end-of-year holiday compression makes starting later than October a risky bet.
For teams ready to move beyond basic commission rate structures, Milligan walked through how QuotaPath thinks about tiered acceleration — the stair-step rate structure that rewards above-quota performance without creating the ceiling effects of a flat rate plan.
The design principle he recommended is straightforward: two to three rate tiers below 100% attainment, applied retroactively, followed by accelerators above 100% that apply only to incremental dollars above quota. The retroactive structure below quota creates a motivationally significant milestone effect — when a rep crosses from 59% to 60% attainment, the step-up in rate applies to all prior deals, creating a visible and tangible reward for momentum.
Above 100%, the logic inverts. Applying accelerators only to the dollars above quota keeps the cost structure predictable without creating the perverse incentives that come from a full retroactive structure at high attainment levels.
The broader goal is what Milligan described as "stacking rates" — a structure where a rep can see clearly how hitting quota, then hitting quality parameters on a specific deal, then closing it on favorable terms compounds into a meaningfully higher earn rate. The rep perceives themselves as gaming the plan in their favor, but the plan is only gameable in ways that directly serve the business.
This kind of structural transparency is also what makes tools like QuotaPath valuable beyond just calculation accuracy. When reps can model "what would I earn if I turned this one-year deal into a two-year deal at a slightly lower ACV?" in real time, they make better decisions in the field — and the plan does its job of aligning rep behavior with business priorities.
The session's final substantive topic addressed a specific planning challenge: how do you set quotas sensibly when headcount is growing rapidly and territory coverage is in flux?
Crosby, who is currently running this exact process at LucidLink, identified two critical inputs that have to be locked down before quota math becomes meaningful: the hiring plan for the coming year and the territory and account assignment structure. Without both, any per-rep quota is a guess dressed up as a plan.
"I think it's critical to have your hiring plan for the next year locked down. You need to know your headcount. Obviously, that's a critical input. You also need to ensure that you have a concrete plan for territory and account assignment." — Meghan Crosby
From there, Milligan added the sanity-check layer that often gets skipped: working backward from the quota to ask whether the activity math is realistic. If a rep needs to close 10 deals per quarter at a 30% op-level win rate, they need 30 qualified opportunities in the pipeline. Is that achievable given territory size, demand density, and expected ACV? Running this math — and sharing it with reps — is one of the most effective ways to convert skepticism about quotas into engagement with the plan. For more on building that math from the ground up, this piece on sales capacity planning offers a useful framework.
The through-line across this session is a familiar one for anyone who has spent time in RevOps: the plan is simple in concept and hard in execution, and the difficulty usually lives in the organizational layer rather than the math. Getting leadership aligned, getting reps heard, and keeping the final product simple enough to be trusted by everyone who has to live inside it — that's the actual work. The comp plan that drives performance isn't necessarily the most sophisticated one. It's the one everyone understands, believes in, and is actively trying to optimize against.
Learn more about how QuotaPath helps revenue operations teams design performance-driving compensation plans, automate commission calculations, and give reps real-time visibility into their earnings.
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