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Sales Commission Plan

Worked sample: the company and data are fictional. The model and method are the ones I use in my work.

A compensation plan that drives the behavior leadership says it wants, modeled deal by deal so reps can verify their own commission instead of opening tickets with Finance. Built for an 8-rep B2B SaaS team.

The problem

A comp plan that read clean on a PDF but unraveled the moment a deal carried a partial-year discount, a multi-year ramp, or a mid-quarter amendment. Reps were spending hours every month reconstructing their own commission. Finance was spending more hours arguing with reps. Sales leadership couldn't answer "is this plan still driving the right deals" because nobody had a clear payout history by deal type.

The approach

Design the plan and the calculator in parallel: if a clause cannot be modeled cleanly, it does not belong in the plan. Tier the accelerators against historical attainment so 70th-percentile reps see a real upside without breaking the comp ratio. Layer in MEDDPICC compliance kickers on Enterprise deals: small payout, big behavioral lever. SPIFs as time-boxed campaigns with explicit start/end and a deal-type filter, not standing programs. The calculator outputs a deal-by-deal payout trace so any rep can see exactly how their number was built.

What the model is built to do

• Built so commission reconciliation takes minutes per rep each month, not hours.
• Doubles as a forecasting tool: reps can model their own quarter against pipeline before commit calls.
• Keeps the plan within the target comp ratio while accelerators meaningfully reward overperformance.
• Designed to make MEDDPICC qualification visible enough that reps keep it current: small kicker, large signal.

What I would do differently

Run the calculator against the prior two quarters of closed-won data BEFORE rolling out the plan, with reps in the room. The first version surfaced two edge cases that the model handled correctly but felt unfair to the reps when they saw their own historical numbers re-computed. A retro pass would have caught them before the all-hands.