[nocoiner]

I get the importance of hitting targets and all, but it seems like horseshit to me that the employee earns no commission between 0-20% of the target, and at 99% of target is at only 80% commission.

Maybe someone with more of a sales mindset than I’ve got would thrive on this, but it feels to me a bit like a “heads I win, tails you lose” outcome for the company. Doesn’t really seem like you’d lose the motivating factors either by opting for a policy that errs toward the super generous in significant upside scenarios.

[marcus0x62]

Sales reps hate these structures. Professional sales managers understand these structures are demotivating and harm sales.

The author to be blunt, simply does not know what he is talking about and nobody should listen to his advice on structuring comp plans.

You might want to forward his article over to your competitors, though.

[candiddevmike]

Sales plans are often a mess of percentages and edge case goals, mostly meant to attract folks by showing a large hypothetical "on target earnings". Then if you do really well you might hit accelerators which can be exponentially more.

The reality is these quotas are typically created to be either crushingly hard to achieve or the best a financial model predicts your territory can do. Either way, the deck is typically stacked against you, even if the math seems favorable.

[brk]

Your gut is right. That is horseshit. I’ve built many comp plans and hired several sales teams. I’d never offer that structure to any sales person I wanted to retain. These kinds of gamed comp plans are for people that don’t really know how to build the right teams.