It’s comp planning season! Also known as Comptober <3
This month, RevOps, Finance, and Sales leaders are building the compensation plans that will ideally run all of 2027.
They’re working through what to pay for, how much upside to build in, and what a fair quota looks like.
Most of those plans will clear finance’s cost model and legal’s fairness bar.
And, most of them will quietly fail to move the two things that matter most: revenue quality and rep urgency.
Here’s a stat worth sitting with: According to RepVue’s Cloud Sales Index, average quota attainment across SaaS sales orgs was 42.69% in Q2 last year. That means the average rep closed less than half their quota that quarter. We consider 80% a healthy attainment number.
When a whole team falls that far below it, the problem is rarely the reps.
It’s usually the plan, and the quota underneath it.
Our newest report, Building Performance-Driving Compensation Plans, breaks down why comp plans fail to drive performance and what to do about it before you finalize next year’s. Inside:
- The five principles behind plans that actually change behavior: pay mix matched to influence, a limit of three measures, a real threshold, tiered accelerators, and quotas calibrated to territory instead of backed into from a revenue number
- A 3-point diagnostic you can run against your current AE or CS plan in ten minutes
- Three fully worked examples, with real payout math, for a Mid-Market Account Executive, a Customer Success Manager, and an SDR/BDR
- A 5-part stress test (cost, windfall and edge cases, behavior alignment, fairness, and operational readiness) to run before any plan goes live
If you’re touching comp plans for next year at all, read this before you finalize anything.
Want a second opinion on your own plan? Atlas can run this same diagnostic against it and flag the two changes with the biggest performance impact. Book time with our team
