At QuotaPath, we believe in building fair and logical compensation plans that drive growth for the organization and increase earnings for reps.

Fair plans give reps a true shot at hitting on-target earnings (OTEs).

So, what happens when reps go out on parental leave? Are they earning any incentive pay while they’re out with their new baby, like a percentage or an average? Is anyone keeping their pipeline warm, so it’s not empty upon their return? Are they coming back to a full quota while staring up at their team’s leaderboard from the very bottom?

Unfortunately, we found that the answers are often “No.”

That is why QuotaPath recently hosted the webinar, “Creating Fair Sales Leave Policies,” in collaboration with Women in Sales, so that every organization will eventually say “Yes” to all of those questions.

Our panelists included Kelly O’Halloran, Director of Content at QuotaPath, Allison Whalen, CEO and co-founder of Parentaly, Jessi Johanson, VP of Sales at Tilt, and Ryan Milligan, VP of RevOps, QuotaPath.

The panel discussed topics like best practices for sales leave policies, creating an effective return process, managing time off, and the importance of establishing clear and transparent policies.

Best Practices for Sales Leave Policies

The conversation began with the panelists discussing tips on developing effective sales parental leave policies and how to navigate related challenges.

How to Determine Incentive Pay During Leave

Ryan outlined best practices for determining incentive pay during leave, emphasizing the importance of clear policies and documentation.

“You want to have a completely clear policy for what is going to happen to pipeline based on stage, depth, and time to close. You have two types of pipeline: pipeline you expect to close while you’re on leave and pipeline you don’t expect to close but need to continue nurturing,” Ryan said.

“Typically, you want to give the bulk of the credit to the rep who did the work to prepare the pipeline to close. I advise senior leaders such as sales managers, directors, and CROs to step in and support the closing of that handful of ops. Then give your rep full credit for the work that they did to prepare those opportunities to close while they are on leave.”

Ryan continued, “For upstage pipeline, use a split policy where the rep going on leave gets a clear and determined amount of credit based on the depth of that pipeline before they go on leave.”

Conduct a review with the rep a month before they plan to go on leave, where you clearly document the open ops, their stage, and how compensation for each will be handled during leave, as well as what will happen when they return from leave.

Ryan also explained, “You should have a clear existing pipeline policy as well as a guaranteed variable component. Typically, orgs pay anywhere from a third to half of the variable guaranteed while a seller is on leave. That pairs with the commission the seller expects to receive on the deals forecasted to close while they’re on leave. This should get them as close as possible to full OTE based on the work they did prior to going on leave.”

According to Ryan, your leave policy is “a ramping plan in reverse. It’s a very clear, documented, and mutually agreed upon policy that both protects the cash needs of the business while protecting the relationship with the seller and preparing them to be successful when they return.”

Jessi shared her innovative approach of opening up a stretch assignment for her team to cover for an employee on leave, which worked well for her team.

“My Account Manager took a leave of absence for a full quarter. Gone are the days when Jessi is everyone’s backfill. We’re too big now, and I have too much going on. Things will fall through the cracks. So, we decided to try opening up a stretch assignment for anyone in the organization who wanted to apply.”

Jessi continued, “They were essentially her backfill, and we took away most of her other duties, except getting contracts renewed. We estimated it was half a day to a full day a week, and we would do a commission split. We posted the job internally, and I received six applications. I interviewed everyone and hired someone from my marketing team. It was super unexpected. He absolutely crushed it, and we have all on time renewals so far this quarter.”

Source Data/Examples from Like Companies

Allison discussed the importance of having a clear policy and using data from other companies to advocate for better leave policies.

“If you’re advocating that your company needs an explicit policy, try using information about what other companies are doing. Then you can say, Hey, this is something that we need to have as an organization,” Allison said. “There are enough examples from other companies that you can bring forward to say, which one do we think we want here? Although leadership at companies may want to do the right thing, it seems too difficult. So, using data and showing what other companies are doing is powerful.”

Jessi emphasized the need for managers to be educated on leave laws and to support their teams effectively during and after leave.

“Managers tend not to say anything if they don’t know what to say. And the worst way for your manager to show up is not to say anything to you. The worst-case scenario is they actually say something that they shouldn’t,” Jessi said.

“Consequently, some education on what they can and can’t say, some leave laws, what job protection means, and if they can communicate with an employee while they’re on leave. Things like that will help a manager know what the guardrails are and what they can and can’t do, so they can have these conversations with the employee, know they’re saying the right thing, or at least doing their best and not saying anything they shouldn’t.”

Returning to Work After Leave

After a thorough discussion about creating fair sales leave policies, the panelists’ conversation turned to best practices for successful return-to-work experiences that boost retention.

Jessi and Ryan discussed the importance of a clear ramp-up period for employees returning from leave, including the emotional support needed.

“You treat a person returning from leave in the same way you would when ramping a new hire,” Ryan said. And that needs to include the same quota credit, quota relief, training, and enablement for those returning from leave.

“We have a four-week ramp-up period for all employees that’s full-time pay for a part-time schedule,” according to Jessi, to ease the transition after parental leave. She continued, “One of the hardest things is emotionally supporting the employee when they’re back. The return isn’t hard because they’re returning, it’s hard because they’re scared that they’re not going to be able to get their pipeline back where it needs to be, close deals, and make money again.”

“I have not had a single person who couldn’t do it, but it’s so scary, especially when you’re great at your job, you’ve taken a break for the first time, and now you’re back. So, I spend a lot of my one-on-ones reassuring, supporting, talking through it, and really advocating for that person,” Jessi shared.

The Manager’s Role

Allison highlighted the role of managers in ensuring a smooth return to work, including setting up opportunities to maintain momentum and confidence.

The return-to-work experience is the most important thing for any manager. The worst feeling when you return to work in sales is that you’ve got this stale pipeline, like starting over.
At Parentally, we start preparing a month before a rep’s return from leave. “They’ll be so stressed if they have nothing. However, there are some great ways for sales managers to tee up opportunities, depending on the context and your sales cycle,” said Allison.

“For example, we just had someone return from leave,” Allison continued, “We had prepared by having our Head of Marketing set a bunch of meetings and conduct early-stage meetings so that when she came back, we were able to give her some new opportunities.”

Every manager should consider how they handle the return-to-work experience to help the rep get excited, feel like there’s momentum, and have something to work on. “It doesn’t need to be, here’s an entire beautiful pipeline for you to come back to,” Allison said. “But it should be here are a few exciting deals that we started that I’m giving to you as a confidence builder, an exciting thing. I think that goes a long way in helping people get their groove back.”

Ryan added, “If you have a faster sales cycle, like we tend to, and you have a mid-market or enterprise rep who’s coming back, give them a couple of quick SMB wins to get their confidence back.”

Transparency is Key

The panelists discuss the challenges of managing time off and the importance of transparency and flexibility in policies.

According to Allison, “Oftentimes, non-birth parents will game the system. For example, a rep knows a huge deal will hit while they’re on leave. If based on the numbers, they’d earn more by being in the seat when that deal hits, non-birth parents often come back for a week, so they are in the seat when the deal closes, so they get full credit. Then they go back out on leave, which creates cultural issues.”

Since non-birth parents aren’t usually able to do that because they’re on short-term disability,” Allison continued, “I still see it happen more often than you would expect.”

To avoid having this happen, Allison shares, “We see a lot of companies say you can’t split your leave, or you can split your leave, but it needs to be in chunks of four weeks at a time to limit its occurrence.” This prevents people from coming back for one week when the deal is going to close. However, it becomes a judgment call of whether it’s worth optimizing for that.

“The clear split policy is the best way to approach it as long as you, as the leader, and the employees are on the same page about when the splits are going to happen, how long they’re going to happen, and why. A lot of families use split leave to extend leave policies naturally until they have other paths to childcare,” Ryan added. “The rep must be back for long enough to get fully back in the seat before going back on leave again, due to ramp-up and ramp-down time. You must be clear about maximum splits or designated length of chunks.”

This is a Retention strategy

Additionally, Kelly and Ryan emphasized the need for organizations to prioritize leave policies as a way to retain top performers and ensure long-term success.

Sales teams are being asked to do more with fewer team members. For instance, the team that used to be 40 reps might now be 10, trying to drive as much revenue as possible. This is a reason why leaders should prioritize leave policies. Ryan suggests that they consider, “What if your top performing seller left tomorrow? It’s so much more painful for a 10-person team than a 40-person team.”

“That moment of returning from leave is a massive point of reflection for a person as to whether they think this company is the right fit for them in the long term, Ryan explained. “There’s a lot of emotion in that process since you’re potentially leaving your child, who you’ve been with for a while, in a different body of care. Plus, you’re staring at that leaderboard that you’re at the bottom of while you might have major confidence issues.”

That’s why it’s essential that you communicate to the seller that you have confidence in their ability to be very successful upon their return, and that you have a clear process in place to get them back up and running.

On the other hand, “if you want to be super pragmatic about it, it’s a math equation,” Ryan explained, “If you just stripped out half of your top performing sellers who all, went on leave in the next three or four years, what would that mean if you lost all of them because of a terrible leave policy? What would that mean for revenue, for performance, for Board reporting?”

Ryan added, “This makes it a smart, quantitative business decision to have a good leave policy for strong rep retention, long-term success of the business, and predictability of revenue.”

Kelly shared that she loved the mindset shift that occurred during the conversation, from less focus on let’s not have the sales rep be scared. The focus shifted to “Let’s have the sales leader be scared that they’re going to lose that sales rep for having a poor policy in place,” as Kelly described, “versus someone being scared to come back or to have a child, while being a sales professional.”

Recommended Reading

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Q&A with Attendees

Next, the panelists responded to questions from attendees and wrapped up with additional comments.

The panelists addressed questions from the audience, including best practices for early-stage companies and ways to empower managers.

“Best practices across industries right now are typically 12 weeks and giving non-birthing parents as much time as well,” Jessi shared in reference to early-stage companies. “Then consider how the policy applies to OTE compared to base, and if you plan to have any guaranteed commission or variable comp.”

“I would be more focused on what to do, especially if they’re the only salesperson. Don’t put so much pressure on yourself to define a policy forever,” Allison added. “You are small, and you need to consider what’s best for the business, for this person, and what’s realistic.”

According to Ryan, you can empower managers with messaging about supporting new parents with a strong leave policy for their benefit and for retention to protect the business, which trickles all the way down to the person going on leave.

The panelists discussed the importance of top-down support for leave policies and the need for clear communication and education for managers.

“Your thoughts on parental leave must be top down from a CRO or management level to be successful and supported in terms of how a VP of sales, for example, could support her manager who has a team member going on leave,” Ryan said. “The conversation should come from a VP of sales or CRO to say we have these policies in place, because I know that if I don’t have a policy, I run the risk of losing a top performer tomorrow. This is especially true at an incredibly lean growth startup and hyper hyper-damaging to revenue predictability.”

“Managers also need help with things like, what am I supposed to do if I’m a person down? Sometimes we forget that most managers want to support people, but wonder, ‘Am I being held accountable to a team goal when my headcount is being cut?’ That’s when they need their manager to help with this,” according to Allison.

“For instance, they need more budget to bring in a backfill or spend more money on marketing. So, managers are also scared. They want to know, ‘How am I supposed to deliver business results?’”

Jessi added that support for managers includes “any kind of education, on leave, laws, things like FMLA, so they know how to effectively communicate with and support their teams before, during, and after leave.”

Importance of Flexibility & Support Upon Return

Lastly, the panelists share final thoughts on the importance of flexibility and support for new parents in sales roles.

Jessi talked about both flexibility and support for new parents as they return from leave. She explained, “The reasons you need time off as a parent are changing. It’s probably going to be because daycare is closed, your kid’s sick, or you have a doctor’s appointment.”

Reps get anxious because they’re new parents and didn’t know they would need all this random time off. “I tell my team, you are going to have days where you’re going to call me and say, I have to go pick up my kid from school, or they were up all night and have a fever, so they can’t work today,” Jessi said. “That’s okay. I know this is going to happen. I’m here for you. We’ll figure out coverage. I can jump on a call for you if I need to or somebody else can.”

“We got it,” Jessi continued, “but I don’t want them to suffer with that in silence and not be open with me about what they’re going through. So, I have those conversations early and often in the beginning, until they get comfortable with being super transparent with what’s going on and how I can help.”

Ryan explained that there are two ways to look at support in terms of parental leave. “I am supporting you because I care about you as a person and want you to have a great and fruitful pregnancy relationship with your child. I also think you are key to the success of this business quantitatively, so I’m investing in your leave and your return from leave, because it makes financial sense for this business.”

For support in building fair compensation plans, book a time with Ryan for a compensation plan consultation. To learn more about how QuotaPath automates commission tracking and payouts, schedule a demo.

For years, Augury’s RevOps team calculated commissions for 20 quota-carrying GTM employees the old-fashioned way: sprawling Excel spreadsheets.

The process involved countless manual checks that stretched 45 days each quarter. As RevOps Team Lead David Thai recalls, the lack of automation wasn’t just time-consuming; it created gaps in transparency for both sales leadership and finance.

Implementing QuotaPath changed that overnight.

By automating workflows and centralizing commission data, Augury condensed its commission preparation from a six-week slog to just 15 days (sometimes less), while giving account executives and CSMs real-time visibility into their earnings.

The result? A streamlined, auditable process that saves the team 25 days each quarter, drives rep engagement, improves forecasting accuracy, and elevates the overall compensation experience.

Give & Gets of Comp Plans

Learn how to maintain sales rep engagemen while making adjustments to your comp plan.

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The Challenge: Manual Processes and Limited Transparency

Managing commissions for 20 reps, of course, came with its challenges, especially due to the complexity of their compensation plans and the team’s limited Excel expertise.

Processing commissions was a huge time sink.

As David explained, “It originally took 45 days to do our quarterly commissions from start to finish due to all the processes and workflows we had to trigger, creating a lot of manual pains.”

“We had payment eligibility rules on a clunky master spreadsheet. Consequently, it took a long time for new team members to understand these calculations,” according to David. This limited their visibility into commission eligibility, budget forecasting, and finance alignment.

The Search for a Better Way

That’s when they turned to automation.

Augury’s VC portfolio partner recommended QuotaPath to David when he started investigating potential solutions. QuotaPath used a detailed process, “really mapping out the complexities of our comp plan, and showcasing nuanced and specific demos that fit our use-cases,” David said.

QuotaPath offered the flexibility necessary to match Augury’s complex compensation plans with robust modeling, workflows, and eligibility tracking. David said QuotaPath’s collaborative, customer-first mindset sealed the deal, as they worked together to ensure alignment across people, processes, and priorities.

Watch David’s full interview above.

The Solution: QuotaPath to Scale

David had explained the problems he wanted to solve as “twofold—a time problem, spending 45 days to do quarterly commissions, and a transparency problem for the finance and RevOps teams.”

Implementing QuotaPath addressed these issues.

Augury saw significant time savings.

“Now it takes 15 days or less,” said David.

Plus, he and his team have improved visibility into commission data and eligibility by eliminating the numerous steps required when payment eligibility data was maintained in a master spreadsheet.

Unlocking operational metrics provided easier audit-readiness and more streamlined collaboration across finance and RevOps.

“These were metrics we couldn’t even track before. Now we have transparency and reportability,” David said.

Augury also gained clearer visibility into forecasts and accruals after adopting QuotaPath.

“Now we have greater line of sight between budget forecasting and commission forecasting, both monthly and annually, when it comes to accruals,” said David. “QuotaPath truly unlocked capabilities that had been gaps for us in the past.”

Additionally, QuotaPath provided Augury with a platform that would also scale with them.

Sales Team Reception

How does sales feel? Pretty damn good.

The reps prefer QuotaPath over spreadsheets. 

“When you ask them, would you take this or an Excel sheet? They’ll say, QuotaPath 100% of the time,” David said. The reps enthusiastically adopted the forecasted earnings feature.

“They love being able to see how much they stand to gain,” David added.

This better understanding of their comp plans and incentive math boosts morale and motivation.  “They understand how they get paid, and it’s a huge morale driver. It motivates reps to differentiate and pitch harder,” said David.

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ROI & Results

Augury’s ROI includes time savings, increased operational capacity, and greater accuracy and confidence.

“We’ve saved 25 days per quarter,” David reported.

These time savings translate to what David calls “opportunity costs.” This additional operational capacity has been reallocated to strategic GTM tasks such as “scaling the business or developing GTM strategy to drive revenue bookings,” David shared.

Augury also gained improved accuracy and confidence as “QuotaPath helped us get line-of-sight into commission and budget forecasting monthly and annually,” David said. Additionally, better operational metrics visibility helped. “These were metrics we couldn’t even track before.”

David employs a holistic approach to measuring ROI, considering both tangible savings and the broader impact on team satisfaction and performance.

“We combine subjective and objective measures like rep feedback surveys and operational costs we’re reclaiming,” David said.

Support and Partnership Experience

David voiced high praise for QuotaPath’s support team, especially Tyler Rody (Account Manager), and Matt Kerlin (Customer Support Manager). “Tyler and Matt are phenomenal,” said David. “I’ve asked a million questions, and their response time, real-time support, and product knowledge have been incredible.”

Strong implementation support helped translate a nuanced comp plan into a working system “by providing efficient, solution-oriented suggestions,” as described by David. “They would hop on a call, do screen recordings, and walk me through everything in my instance of QuotaPath. It was immensely helpful!”

Looking Ahead

QuotaPath has become a critical part of Augury’s infrastructure. David said that he’d be “hard pressed to go back to spreadsheets.” And he added, “QuotaPath is a massive improvement in quality of life over here.”

QuotaPath has proved that it can support Augury as they grow and evolve. As David explained, “In the past two years we have added head count and the number of people on the variable compensation plan, and are seeing the scalability of QuotaPath in real time…our ability to do approval workflows, vet by plan, and break things out by component means we can be as open or granular as we want,” David said. 

To learn how QuotaPath can support your incentive management process, book time with our team here.

Gathering leads is one thing, but turning them into paying customers is another.

One way to do this is through crafting a sales email sequence that can lead them from interest into action. When done well, a well-designed sequence can help you connect with your target audience on a personal level and guide them towards choosing you.

So, the question is: how do you create a sales email sequence that converts? We’ll look at the steps to follow, some top tips, and provide some templates to get you started.

7 Steps to Create an Email Sequence

1. Define the Goal of Your Email Marketing Sequence

Before you start writing and sending out emails, you need to establish your purpose. What do you intend to achieve at the end of the exercise? The answer will impact your entire strategy as each goal requires a different approach.

Obviously, one main goal is to convert leads to customers, but you might have other goals too. For instance, you might want pre-launch signups for a new product, or to re-engage previously active customers.

You should also consider secondary goals. Let’s say you’re emailing new subscribers. Your primary goal is to encourage them to renew their subscription. But your secondary goal might be to help them understand how to use your product. This would lead to a different sequence than one with a secondary goal of getting them to download and engage with a recent whitepaper.

2. Identify and Set Up Triggers

Triggers are points at which automated emails are sent out. They’re usually based on leads taking a specific action, but can also be based on time. Common triggers include:

• Signing up for a newsletter
• Downloading a free resource
• Adding something to their cart, but then leaving
• Three months passing since their last purchase
• Two weeks before their subscription renews

Once you’ve pinpointed the best ones for your offering, you can set up automated email sequences to be sent out after a trigger event. This ensures that your emails are timely and relevant to the recipient’s recent interactions with your business. As a result, your emails are personalized and more effective.

For example, say a customer abandoned their cart. A trigger message could be sent the following day to remind them of what they left behind. It could also include a limited-time discount to encourage them to complete their purchase.

3. Map Out the Sequence

Now, you need to decide on the number of emails you want in your sequence and their timing. 

A well-crafted sales email sequence eases leads towards becoming paying customers. They don’t feel bombarded, but your products and services remain at the forefront of their mind. For a re-engagement sequence, you might start with a gentle reminder of your value proposition. Then, follow it up with a nudge highlighting new features. And, finally, a compelling offer, like a discount, to win them back.

That said, how you structure your sequence will depend on your goal and rapport with your audience. A B2B company selling small business phone systems will need a very different approach to a B2C skincare brand – the former will be looking for subscriptions, while the latter might want small, regular purchases. 

4. Create Engaging Content

All that planning and effort will be wasted if the content of your email is irrelevant to recipients. Every part of your sequence should be carefully considered, from the subject line to the color scheme.

Consider your goal with each individual email beyond the overarching sequence aim. Are you trying to be educational? Sales-focused? Is the focal point user-generated content (UCG), or are you highlighting some new research?  

Let’s say you’re a communications company, and you’re writing an email sequence designed to turn free trial members into paying customers. Your early emails might be educational, highlighting particular features they may not be aware of or discussing VoIP benefits and drawbacks. Later emails turn to UCG, showing a couple of specific case studies in the same industry as your lead. Finally, you craft the perfect sales pitch and call to action (CTAs) to guide them towards the desired action.

You should also personalize your messages by addressing recipients by their first name or business name, referencing their recent actions, and focusing on what you can do for them specifically.

5. Automate with the Right Tools

The sales tools you use can make or break your email sequence campaign.

Invest in an email marketing software that provides automation, personalization, and analytics. The program should allow you to segment your audience based on their demographic and behavioral data.

It’s also worth checking for A/B testing capabilities. This feature enables you to try out different versions of your email to determine what works best. For example, you can test subject lines, different CTAs, or content formats to optimize your campaign’s performance.

Having software that supports automated email triggers is key to your campaign running smoothly.

6. Test and Optimize

So your strategy and content are ready. Great! However, don’t roll out your email sequence just yet. You need to test different elements first to see what works best. In particular, make sure it’s mobile-friendly as 92.3% of people access the internet via their phone, and 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices.

Image from Exploding Topics

Take the time to trial your new strategy on a small audience segment. Experiment with different email subject lines and content, and even sending times, to see which has the highest email open rates. This data will then help you optimize the campaign before a full launch.

Keep in mind that testing and optimization are continuous processes. Monitor the results, listen to customer feedback, and pay attention to wider market trends. Additionally, make sure your emails work with any new OS updates or other major changes.

7. Iterate and Refine

Email sequence, like other aspects of email marketing, isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it process. For it to be successful in the long run, you need to monitor its performance. We’ve mentioned regular testing, but make sure to track key metrics like open rate, click-through rates, and conversion rates. These indicators reveal how well your emails are received by your audience and areas for improvement.

You can then use this data to make adjustments and iterate on your strategy to achieve better results.

Tips for Crafting an Email Sequence that Converts

Understand Your Target Audience

The most successful email campaigns begin with knowing who you’re writing to. For B2B brands, this means knowing their industry and their role within their organization. For B2C businesses, you want more personal insight into things like income bracket and demographic details. In both cases, you need to know their main pain points and what they value.

Taking the time to know your recipients can make a major difference. Consider a communications solutions company approaching SMEs and enterprise leads. When introducing their solution to a small family-run bookkeeping business, the lead-nurturing sequence might start with a common business challenge: outdated phone systems. The subsequent email could then introduce a modern communication solution by answering the question what is voice over IP and how it can revolutionize business communication.

However, when addressing a Head of IT at a large business, they can skip that elementary bit and go straight into highlighting their enterprise-level features.

Understanding your audience ensures you only send them emails they care about, which is crucial for engagement and conversion.

Write Attention-Grabbing Subject Lines

You’re one one of hundreds of businesses fighting for a prospect’s dollar. Standing out is key, especially if you’re using cold email services and approaching with no warm-up. The content of your emails might be amazing, but if no-one ever clicks through, it’s all for nothing. 

That’s why writing attention-grabbing subject lines is vital. 

That doesn’t mean you should rely on things like ALL CAPS or lots of exclamations!!! All that does is make you look like spam. Instead, focus on crafting a line that’s relevant and specific. It should spark curiosity or create a sense of urgency.If it fits, you could include the recipient’s name, business name, or industry.

Taking the above points into consideration, a compelling subject line will look something like this:

Is [company] still using traditional phone systems? Let’s change that!

Focus on Benefits Over Features

It can be tempting to go on about that shiny new feature you’ve just added to your product. After all, it took your team long hours to get it right. However, the reality is that all customers care about is what is in it for them.

How does your shiny new feature make their life easier? That’s what you need to focus on. For instance, don’t say “our VoIP system has call analytics.” Instead, say, “ monitor every call and get actionable insights to improve customer service and boost sales performance.” 

Leverage Social Proof

Say you are contemplating doing business with a company. Then you learn that prominent organizations in your field have worked with them in the past, and left positive testimonials. That automatically increases your trust levels and makes you more inclined to patronize them.

That’s social proof, and humans value it. Humans often look to the actions and opinions of others to guide their own behavior.

For an email sequence, this can be in the form of highlighted reviews, a brief case study, or even aggregate performance metrics (companies like [brand] see a 45% reduction in packaging with our solution).

The idea is to show that others have succeeded with your product, which suggests they can too.

Include Compelling CTAs

Make it easy for readers to know what to do after every step in your sales sequence. That means every email needs an easy-to-identify call to action. If you want them to download something, end with ‘Want to learn more? Download our whitepaper now. Your language should be action-oriented and create a sense of urgency.

To ensure your CTAs stand out visually, you can make them a different color or turn them into clickable buttons. Again, make sure to test this on mobile devices — if the button is too small, it’ll lead to frustration rather than engagement.

Employ Copywriting Frameworks

AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) is one copywriting framework that can provide structure for your emails.

Let’s say you provide payroll automation.

You might grab the attention of small businesses by mentioning that automation can free up their time to focus on other things. Then, you pique their interest by highlighting that it can help them remain compliant and make tax season easier. As the company showcases how easy it is to set up and use, it creates desire. Finally, it prompts action with a clear CTA to schedule a demo.

AIDA helps guide prospects through the buyer’s journey, ensuring each email serves a specific purpose in moving them closer to conversion.

Types of Sales Email Sequences with Examples

Welcome Email Sequence

A welcome sequence is the first communication you will have with potential customers. It is where you make a first impression and make a case for your product or service.

Keep it short and to the point, but ensure recipients have all the information they need regarding the next steps.

Here’s an example of what a good welcome email aimed at someone in the ‘free trial’ stage of a small business phone systems service might look like:

Subject: Thank You for Trying Out [Product Name]

Hi Recipient’s First Name,

Thank you for taking [Product Name] for a spin. Just checking in to see if everything is going well so far. Let us know if we can help in any way, or take a look at our knowledge base [here].

For most of our customers, [Product Name] is helping them save time and money. Here’s what one of them had to say:

[Customer Testimonial]

Still on the fence about joining the [Product Name] family? Use coupon code JOINTHEFAMILY to get 30% off on your first month subscription.

Don’t hesitate to chat with us if you have any more questions.

Enjoy your trial!

Cheers,

[Product Name] Team.

Lead Nurturing Email Sequence

A lead nurturing email sequence helps you build relationships with prospects and guide them towards making a commitment. It makes the entire sales process feel more natural and less pushy, while providing value at every step of the journey. You can also link them to other resources – for instance, if they’ve downloaded one ebook, why not point them towards the rest of your learning content?

Take this reminder to download a lead magnet, for example:

Subject: Reminder: 100 Leads in 30 Days are Waiting for You

Hey Recipient’s First Name,

Thank you for downloading 100 LEADS IN 30 DAYS.

Click here to access the eBook + all bonuses. 

Then why not let us know at [social media link] how you found it?

Best wishes,

[Brand Name].

Re-engagement Email Sequence

As the name suggests, a re-engagement sequence is designed to help you re-engage inactive subscribers. These emails usually include incentives, such as special discounts or exclusive offers, to encourage them to return to the business.

For example:

Subject: Here’s a Discount, ‘Cause We Miss You

Hey Recipient’s First Name,

Long time no see! We wanted to reach out with a special 25% off discount just for you.

Let’s make up and continue building something great together. Use code WELCOMEBACK at checkout today.

Love from [Product Name].

Wrapping Up

A sales email sequence, like every email, gives you the chance to connect with prospects on a personal level. It allows you to understand their desires, challenges, and needs. This way, you can present your product or service in a way that resonates with their unique situation.

This slow-building approach guides your leads down the funnel, and before you know it, those leads will be loyal customers.

Follow the steps above to get started, and remember to continuously test and refine your approach. 

In today’s competitive and fast-paced business environment, tracking the right sales performance metrics is essential for sales managers to gauge their teams’ performance. 

One key metric that offers valuable insights into both product movement and sales team performance is the sell-through rate. 

In this article, we’ll break down what the sell-through rate is, why it matters, and how to use it to measure and boost your sales team performance.

What Is Sell-Through Rate?

The sell-through rate is a key sales metric that measures the amount of inventory you’ve sold over a specific period of time versus the amount of inventory shipped to you from manufacturers. 

Sell-through rate provides sales leaders and marketing teams with actionable insights into how well products are performing in the market. 

This helps them assess product demand, identify popular products, and evaluate the overall health of their inventory management. It can also serve as a direct indicator of how aligned a company’s sales strategies, marketing efforts, and supply chain operations are with real-time market demand.

How to Calculate Sell-Through Rate

The sell-through rate formula is:

For example, if you received 1,000 units of a product in a given time period and sold 700 units, your sell-through rate would be:

What’s a Good Sell-Through Rate?

There’s no universal answer to what makes a “good sell-through rate”. Benchmarks can vary greatly by industry, product type, sales channel, and time frame. Here’s a quick glimpse at some average sell-through rates across a few industries:

A general benchmark for many retail and B2B businesses is between 70–80%. Rates at this level typically indicate strong product demand, efficient sales processes, and well-aligned marketing strategies.

Lower sell-through rates might point to inventory issues, ineffective sales effort, or misalignment with the target market. 

Understanding what qualifies as a good rate for your business model allows you to set realistic sales goals and allocate resources more effectively. It’s a good idea to do some research and find out what the average sell-through rate is in your specific industry.

Why Is It Important to Measure Sell-Through Rate?

Understanding your sell-through rate is about more than just tracking how much inventory moves. It can also provide valuable insights into your sales team performance, product viability, and the effectiveness of your sales and marketing strategies.

Here are five key reasons why tracking sell-through rate is vital for any business looking to stay competitive and maximize profitability.

Identify Your Best and Worst Selling Products

Tracking your sell-through rate by product type or product category helps you identify which items are consistently in demand and which are lagging behind. 

This insight allows sales reps and marketing teams to double down on popular products and implement promotions, bundles, or phase-outs for items that aren’t meeting expectations. 

It also informs future marketing campaigns, allowing marketers to secure interest by platforming your most popular products.

Reduce Storage Costs

Excess inventory ties up capital and drives up storage costs. By regularly analyzing your sell-through rate, you can better align inventory purchases with actual product demand, leading to leaner stock levels and less waste.

This not only improves your inventory turnover ratio but also helps your business reduce carrying costs by avoiding markdowns, spoilage, or obsolescence. 

Manage Cash Flow

The speed at which you convert inventory into closed deals directly affects your cash flow. A healthy sell-through rate ensures steady revenue inflow, allowing you to reinvest in marketing campaigns and new product development.

Businesses with sluggish sell-through often struggle with liquidity issues, limiting their ability to capitalize on sales opportunities or respond to shifts in market dynamics. 

Optimize Your Supply Lines

Accurate sell-through data helps streamline your supply chain. With real-time visibility into what’s selling and what’s not, sales managers can better coordinate with vendors and reduce the risk of stockouts or overstocking.

This improves customer experiences, ensures better alignment with customer demand, and supports the creation of more agile, responsive inventory strategies. 

Measure Success

At its core, sell-through rate is a great performance goal to monitor. It helps gauge the effectiveness of your sales processes, marketing initiatives, and the entire sales team. 

Whether you’re tracking monthly sales, comparing against revenue targets, or measuring growth over time, this inventory metric provides an anchor for understanding how your efforts translate into results.

By integrating it into your sales metrics dashboards, you can monitor team progress toward broader goals and uncover potential areas for improvement in the sales pipeline.

Factors Affecting Sell-Through Rates

Understanding the factors that influence sell-through rate is crucial for making effective adjustments to your sales strategies. Let’s explore some of the key drivers behind fluctuations in this essential metric.

Pricing

Your pricing strategy is one of the most direct levers impacting sell-through rate. If a product is priced too high relative to the market conditions, it may sit in inventory for longer periods. On the other hand, pricing too low can cut into margins and undervalue your product offerings.

Availability

No matter how compelling your product is, if it’s not available when and where customers need it, your sell-through rate will suffer. Stockouts hurt sales and erode trust, which are among the main factors influencing where shoppers spend their money. 

Meanwhile, overstocking increases storage costs and eats into profits. Balancing inventory levels with product demand, especially across different sales channels, is key. 

Supply Chain

Your supply chain has a direct effect on how quickly you can replenish stock and fulfill orders. Delays or inefficiencies here can cause gaps in availability and hinder sales reps from maximizing sales opportunities.

Sales Team Performance

How well your sales team performs directly impacts sell-through rates, influencing the effectiveness of product sales and how quickly inventory moves. 

A strong sales team (perhaps motivated by compensation) drives higher conversion rates and ensures inventory turns over efficiently. 

Marketing

Strong marketing campaigns drive awareness and urgency, boosting product demand and accelerating movement through the sales pipeline. When marketing and sales align effectively, the result is increased visibility, higher conversion rates, and a more consistent sell-through rate.

Competition

Lastly, your sell-through rate is always affected by what competitors are doing. If rival brands are offering similar products at better prices, your sales are likely to take a hit.

Regularly monitoring the competitive landscape enables you to anticipate moves, refine your business model, and protect your market penetration rate. Staying proactive helps you retain customer attention and avoid losing ground in fast-moving markets.

6 Tips for Utilizing Sell-Through Rate to Gauge Sales Team Performance

Sell-through rate helps the entire sales team assess how well they’re converting leads into customers and effort into results. Here are six practical ways sales leaders can leverage sell-through rate data to evaluate and improve sales team performance.

Track Sell-Through Rate Alongside Other Key Metrics

While sell-through rate offers a window into product performance, it becomes even more impactful when paired with other key sales metrics. 

Key performance indicators (KPIs), such as conversion rates and average deal size, can all be analyzed alongside sell-through rate to give a clearer picture of the performance of the sales team.

Creating sales performance dashboards that include data points from all these metrics allows sales managers to see the full picture, from inventory turnover rate to how quickly leads become closed opportunities. Solutions like business process automation can track these KPIs automatically, making it easy to keep up to date on how your team is performing.

This multi-metric approach helps teams more accurately pinpoint where bottlenecks occur and provides valuable insights on how to address them.

Set Clear Performance Targets

Having a clear goal to work toward helps sales managers and their teams focus their efforts toward a measurable goal for success. Using historical sell-through rate data, sales leaders can establish realistic, data-backed performance goals for individual sales agents and entire sales teams. 

For example, if one product category consistently sells through at 80%, that benchmark can serve as a sales target for similar items in the future. By connecting sell-through rate to specific sales goals, teams can stay aligned with broader business objectives while remaining accountable at an individual level. 

These targets are also useful when forecasting and planning, as they allow for data-driven resource allocation and marketing efforts.

Use the Right Tools

It’s important to ensure that the tools and technology utilized across your business can support your sales efforts. A great place to start is your communications platform. 

Investing in reliable communication infrastructure, like business PBX phone systems, ensures your sales teams can contact customers efficiently and affordably.

To realize sell-through data’s full potential, integrate it into your customer relationship management (CRM) system or enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. 

These integrations provide real-time visibility into performance metrics from right across the business, giving decision-makers access to huge amounts of data at a glance.

Free project management tools like Nifty, Monday, and Asana allow teams to align timelines, assign tasks, track progress, and connect daily workflows to broader goals.

Advanced tools can offer predictive insights and flag early warning signs of underperformance by implementing technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

Analyze Trends and Identify Gaps

Trends in sell-through rate over a period of time can reveal important insights about your sales process, market behavior, and team performance. 

Are certain reps consistently exceeding expectations while others fall behind? Do specific products underperform during certain seasons? 

Analyzing data to answer these questions helps identify skill gaps, training needs, or flaws in the sales pipeline. By keeping a close eye on historical trends and aligning them with market dynamics, sales managers can fine-tune their approach, understand what to look for in work experience in resumes of potential hires, and provide better coaching and support to the team.

Focus on Data-Driven Decision-Making

Intuition has its place, but sales team performance improves dramatically when decisions are grounded in data. A strong sell-through rate, analyzed alongside customer behavior insights, can help teams refine messaging, adjust timing, and optimize product focus.

Whether it’s reallocating resources to a high-performing product mix, launching special promotions, or tweaking your conversion optimization strategy, let the data guide your moves. The more data your decision-makers have, the better.

This approach fosters continuous improvement across the sales organization and ensures everyone is rowing in the same direction.

Review and Refine Strategies

Sales isn’t static. Customer preferences shift, market conditions evolve, and new competitors emerge. That’s why it’s vital to continually assess how your sales strategies are performing using real-time sell-through rate data.

Regular performance reviews, informed by your inventory metric and other KPIs, help teams remain agile. Teams that embrace a culture of optimization are better positioned to meet their revenue targets. So, don’t be afraid to pivot when necessary. 

This could mean adjusting your sales content, focusing on a different customer segment, or expanding to a new sales channel.

It’s also possible to change direction by outsourcing other areas of the business to prioritize your sales strategies internally. 

For example, many companies will choose to outsource call center services to third-party partners, ensuring consistent customer engagement while freeing up in-house reps to focus on high-value sales activities.

How to Improve Your Sell-Through Rate

If your sell-through rate isn’t quite hitting the benchmark you’d envisioned, don’t panic; there are plenty of things you can do to give it a boost.

Invest in Marketing

Strong marketing initiatives generate awareness, create demand, and push products faster through the pipeline. You could try using customer relationship management (CRM) data to personalize your messaging and align your marketing strategies with customer needs.

You could also expand your marketing channels to reach new audiences. For example, you could invest in influencer partnerships or social media marketing.

Hold Special Promotions

Time-limited deals, bundle offers, and loyalty discounts are all tried-and-tested methods for accelerating sales. They’re especially effective for slow-moving stock or seasonal inventory. Promotions stimulate demand, encourage repeat purchases, and can help you hit urgent monthly revenue or sales targets

Reduce Inventory

Streamlining your product mix and avoiding overstock helps maintain a healthy inventory turnover rate. Focus on popular products with proven performance, and trim underperforming SKUs that increase sales expenses without contributing meaningfully to your revenue.

Lean inventory strategies not only improve sell-through rate but also reduce your customer acquisition costs and improve ROI across the board.

Avoid Stockouts

Nothing kills momentum like running out of stock on high-demand items. By using forecasting tools that analyze historical trends for predictive sales analytics, you can ensure availability matches demand. 

Avoiding stockouts enhances the customer experience and keeps satisfied customers coming back.

Be Aware of Seasonality

Understanding seasonal trends helps you plan better and stock smarter. You can stock up on items when you know they’re guaranteed to sell and reduce your inventory during periods of lower demand. 

This ensures you always have enough stock to meet demand but are never burdened with reserves that you’ll never sell-through.

Turning Metrics Into Momentum

In today’s fast-paced, data-driven landscape, knowing your sell-through rate isn’t just about tracking how quickly inventory moves; it’s about unlocking actionable insights that can elevate your sales team performance and drive long-term revenue growth.

By integrating sell-through rate with other key sales metrics, aligning it with your sales goals, and using it to inform daily decisions across your sales organization, you can empower sales reps and leaders alike to make smarter, faster, and more strategic moves.

When used effectively, this essential metric bridges the gap between operations and sales, giving you a clear, real-time picture of what’s working and where there’s room to improve. 

Remember that metrics are only as powerful as the actions they inspire. The more you invest in understanding and applying them, the more your sales team can turn effort into results and results into growth.

Designing comp plans by “gut feel” is a gamble most finance leaders can’t afford in today’s economic climate. With increased scrutiny on spend, compressed margins, and heightened accountability, every dollar of variable compensation must be tied to measurable impact.

Fortunately, tools like QuotaPath empower finance teams to move beyond instinct.

With features like Draft Plans and historical overlays, finance and revenue leaders can now pressure-test comp plans using real data and scenario modeling, before those plans hit reps’ desks.

“I prefer when Sales comes to us with options and pre-proposals… then we can determine if it will break the bottom line,” said Ryan Macia, VP of Finance at QuotaPath.

Why Comp Plan Testing Is Essential for Finance

Only 9% of companies had 80%+ quota attainment last year. That means 91% fell short, according to our report. 

The causes? Some point to market conditions, but 31% of revenue leaders cited unrealistic quotas, a problem that can be avoided with robust testing and forecasting.

Unvalidated comp plans often lead to:

• Missed revenue goals
• Overpaid commissions
• Rep turnover due to lack of trust and transparency

QuotaPath helps mitigate all three.

From Intuition to Intelligence: How to Pressure-Test a Comp Plan

Designing a comp plan isn’t just about setting attractive rates and quotas. It’s about understanding the ripple effects each decision has on profitability, performance, and morale. For finance leaders tasked with owning that accountability, a rigorous modeling framework is essential.

At QuotaPath, we recommend a 4-part approach to stress-testing compensation plans before they ever reach your reps.

1. Sensitivity Analysis

What happens if you tweak one variable?

This is your controlled testing environment. Adjust one lever—quota, commission rate, accelerators, draw, or thresholds—and measure the resulting change in cost and attainment distribution.

For example:

• Increase the quota by 10%. How many reps still hit 100%+?
• Drop commission rates by 1. How much do you save across the team, and does it disincentivize performance?
  

Used correctly, sensitivity analysis identifies breakpoints where comp plans become either too expensive or demotivating.

2. Bottom Line First

Reverse engineer your plan from your target commission expense.

Start with the top-line budget you can afford to spend on commissions, often 10–12% of revenue or tied to CAC, and model the comp plan that fits within that constraint.

This approach forces prioritization:

• Do you want to send more to retain top performers?
• Are you willing to flatten earnings to increase quota coverage?
  

Prefect’s Head of Finance, Thomas Egbert, added that while leaders care about and prioritize overpaying commissions, they should focus as much attention on ensuring their reps understand how they’re paid. 

“Finance is always worried about overpaying. But worse than that is when reps don’t understand the generous plan you did build for them,” said Thomas Egbert, Head of Finance at Prefect.

Bottom line modeling keeps generosity within control. Just make sure you can easily communicate your plan structures to your revenue teams. 

3. Run Scenarios

Next, build projections using forecasted attainment data across rep types. 

For instance, you can use QuotaPath’s Draft Plans to run multiple “what-if” versions side-by-side:

• What happens if 80% of reps hit 75% of quota?
• How does the plan scale if you add 20 new sellers mid-year?
• Are you over-indexing on high performers while neglecting the middle 60%?
  

And we have our customer, NeuroFlow, to thank for that product idea to help finance teams test plans. 

“Really early on, we provided feedback about wanting to mock up a plan and run scenarios without using the production environment. During our time as customers, QuotaPath built and released Draft Plans. We’ve used it for at least one year of commission planning,” said Genevieve Moss-Hawkins, Systems Operations Manager at NeuroFlow.

You can also evaluate plan structures: flat rates vs. tiered accelerators, quarterly vs. monthly quotas, or OTE-heavy plans vs. bonus-heavy ones.

4. Deal-Level Commission Cost Analysis

This is where financial modeling becomes a diagnostic tool.

Even if your plan passes the sensitivity test and stays within the top-line commission budget, it’s still possible to lose profitability deal by deal. 

This is especially true when multiple people and roles, BDRs, AEs, SEs, managers, touch the same deal and earn a percentage. You may find yourself unintentionally paying out 30%+ of a deal’s revenue in commissions without realizing it.

At QuotaPath, we call this your deal-level total commission rate.

By running a report that rolls up total commission earned on a deal and compares it against the deal’s revenue, you get a clean percentage that shows how efficient, or inefficient, your payout strategy is. We recommend flagging anything over 30% as a sign to investigate further.

Our VP of RevOps, Sales, and Marketing Ryan Milligan said, “You blink and you’re paying 35% of a deal in total commissions once you add up everyone involved. That’s a hidden cost finance leaders need to track”.

With QuotaPath, you can track this automatically using our reporting suite, making it easy to monitor, benchmark, and optimize payout efficiency per deal.

A Win-Win for Finance and Sales

Ultimately, testing comp plans isn’t about slowing down Sales. It’s about enabling smarter, faster decisions that protect the business and create comp plans reps can trust.

This is why visibility matters as much as modeling.

QuotaPath empowers finance teams to:

• Build and compare comp plan drafts before rollout
• Run forecasts with multiple attainment bands
• Track total cost of commissions in real-time
• Give sales reps and managers clear insight into how their performance translates into pay
  

“The time we got back was huge. I reconcile on a quarterly basis, approve deals quickly, and just export to accounting. Plus, reps don’t need to come through us to get commission answers, it’s all right at their fingertips,” said Genevieve. 

Final Thoughts

Designing compensation plans through financial modeling is a non-negotiable requirement. 

By investing upfront in modeling, scenario testing, and per-deal analysis, finance leaders not only protect margins but also help fuel a motivated, high-performing sales team.

At QuotaPath, we believe the future of compensation is one where Finance and Sales operate from the same playbook, backed by data, not guesswork.

To begin planning for 2026, schedule a meeting with our team today.

When the sales team grows, it’s not just headcount.

New territories, teams, quotas, and more follow suit. And with that comes new comp plans and complexities. 

What starts as a manageable spreadsheet quickly becomes a sprawling web of manual calculations, error-filled audits, and wasted time between RevOps, Finance, and Sales to determine who is getting paid what and when. 

Payout cycle slowdowns follow, and, in the worst-case scenarios, a rep (or reps) receive incorrect commission checks. 

These inefficiencies not only slow down payout cycles, they erode trust across the organization.

Did you know: 75% of sales reps don’t trust are paid fairly (Report)

The natural question arises: How can companies scale their commission processes without scaling their operations team?

That’s exactly where sales commission software like QuotaPath comes in. 

Built to automate, streamline, and bring transparency to sales compensation, QuotaPath helps fast-growing companies eliminate manual pain points while maintaining lean ops. 

And the results speak for themselves: from saving hours of administrative time each month to improving rep motivation and payout accuracy, teams across industries, from SaaS to healthcare, have proven that you don’t need to add headcount to scale commissions.

Below, we’ll explore:

• The hidden costs of commissions and manual tracking
• Why scaling sales shouldn’t mean scaling ops
• And, how QuotaPath’s automation empowers teams to grow smarter, faster, and without compromise.

Calculating the True Cost of Sales Compensation: Key Metrics and Considerations

Unpack the hidden costs of your sales compensation plan and dive into a practical approach for calculating the true cost of commissions and bonuses. Placeholder Content

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The Hidden Costs of Manual Commission Tracking

First, let’s get into the costs of commissions you don’t typically come across until there’s an issue.

Manual commission tracking may seem like the path of least resistance (especially for lean teams), but unexpected costs can accumulate quickly.

Every month, RevOps, Finance, or Sales leaders spend hours toggling between spreadsheets, CRM exports, and comp plan documents to calculate who earned what. This time drain is rarely sustainable, especially as the organization grows and comp plans diversify.

But the real cost? Errors.

A single cell drag error can break the accuracy of the commission calculation, resulting in incorrect payouts. Then what happens? Your reps lose trust in how they’re paid, compromising the entire purpose of commissions: to motivate certain selling behaviors.

Take Keegan Otter, Warmly’s Head of Revenue, who used to run commissions manually.

“We had errors, multiple audits… When six sets of eyes still aren’t enough to prevent errors, you know it’s a problem,” said Keegan. 

So, in addition to financial and operational risks, you now have teams chipping away at rep morale and organizational credibility due to manual sales compensation management practices riddled with mistakes. 

When time and trust are both on the line, the cost of not automating becomes hard to ignore.

The Blind Spot in Spreadsheets: Total Commission Rate

Additionally, when commissions are managed manually, one critical metric is often overlooked: the total commission rate.

This figure represents the combined percentage of a deal’s revenue paid out to every team member who earns compensation, including SDRs, AEs, Marketing, Sales Leaders, and others. While each payout might seem reasonable on its own, spreadsheets make it nearly impossible to track the cumulative cost at the deal, segment, or company level.

And that’s a problem.

Without visibility into total commission rates, Finance leaders can’t accurately forecast commission expenses or evaluate whether compensation is aligned with margin. Worse, high payout overlap across roles can quietly eat into profits without anyone noticing.

Automated solutions like QuotaPath expose this hidden metric in real-time across teams, plans, and deals.

David Thai, Augury’s RevOps Team Lead, switched from spreadsheets to QuotaPath and immediately benefited from greater clarity into total costs.

“Now we have more lines of sight between budget forecasting, commission forecasting on a monthly and a yearly basis… QuotaPath helped unlock a lot of things that I think were gaps for us in the past,” said David. 

When you can see the full picture, you can make smarter decisions, whether it’s adjusting accelerators, capping overlaps, or aligning plans with strategic goals. 

Total commission rate should never be a guess. With QuotaPath, it doesn’t have to be.

Why Scaling Sales Shouldn’t Mean Scaling Ops

Keep in mind, visibility is only half the battle.

Even when leaders understand the full cost of commissions across every role and deal, managing those costs manually is another story entirely.

As headcount increases and compensation plans become more nuanced, spreadsheet-based workflows struggle to keep up under the pressure.

That’s why scaling your sales team shouldn’t automatically mean scaling your ops team. 

Yet that’s often the default when manual processes remain in place.

Instead of empowering existing ops leaders, outdated workflows bog them down, consuming time, increasing errors, and making audits a nightmare. What once worked for a five-person team becomes a high-risk bottleneck as the org scales.

That’s exactly what James Hall, EVP of Revenue at Gappify, experienced firsthand:

“I probably spent five or six hours a month personally doing [commission calculations]… not a great process for everybody,” said James.

With QuotaPath, leaders like James can reclaim their time and refocus on strategy, rather than spreadsheets.

Or Liza Dukhova at Rootly, who runs RevOps solo for a growing sales org:

“My time is a valuable resource. I’m a team of one… QuotaPath saves me hours of time,” said Liza.

A tool like QuotaPath allows lean teams to do more with less by replacing brittle manual work with reliable automation, so you can scale sales, not spreadsheets.

What Scalable Commission Automation Looks Like

So, what does scalable commission management actually look like in practice?

It starts with replacing spreadsheets and disconnected workflows with a platform designed to grow with you. One that integrates with your existing systems, and one that supports complexity without sacrificing usability.

The right commission automation solution will offer:

• CRM integrations (like Salesforce or HubSpot) to sync deal data automatically
• Real-time visibility for reps to track earnings, forecast commissions, and flag discrepancies
• Customizable compensation plans with built-in automation and logic to support diverse roles and structures
  

For teams navigating rapid growth or shifting go-to-market strategies, the ability to move fast without rebuilding your compensation infrastructure is game-changing.

“Once we made the decision to get off spreadsheets… the question was how to do it cost effectively,” said Thomas Egbert, Head of Finance at Prefect, who purchased QuotaPath in 2022.

When teams automate calculations, they unlock time, accuracy, and transparency at scale. 

That’s what sustainable growth looks like.

ROI Realized ROI with QuotaPath

Of course, don’t just take our word for it.

Our customers have achieved significant wins in terms of time saved and money saved.

• Hydrocorp: Paid for QuotaPath in one month by catching commission overpayment mistakes
• Warmly: Scaled from 3 to 35 reps, saving 5–8 hours/month and increasing trust
• Whistic: Reduced commission processing time by 90% for ~30 reps
• Augury: Cut quarterly processing from 45 days to 15 days

Start Early. Scale Smart. No Extra Headcount Required.

The best time to fix your commission process isn’t after it breaks. It’s before it costs you time, trust, and top performers.

“When is it time to introduce automation? Day one,” said Hona VP of Finance Jordan Rupp. “I’ve worked at other organizations where you keep putting that off and you keep thinking and telling yourself, like, ‘Hey, it’s not worth doing it yet.’ But I don’t think we ever really calculate how much time, effort, and also emotional drain it takes on an organization to run this through a manual process.”

As your team scales, QuotaPath ensures your compensation operations don’t have to.

By eliminating manual processes, teams free up hours each month to focus on higher-impact initiatives, such as go-to-market strategy, forecasting, and enablement.

QuotaPath is built for lean teams with big goals. 

Whether you’re preparing for scale or already in hypergrowth mode, it’s never too early (or too late) to build a commission process that works for you.

Ready to get started? Schedule a demo with our team today.

Sales comp isn’t just a sales issue… It’s a margin, forecasting, and behavior issue.

Most CFOs know how much they spend on commissions. 

However, the best CFOs understand why they spend it and whether that expenditure is actually driving the desired outcomes. Because the way we see it (and use it), sales compensation is a strategic lever to influence revenue efficiency, margin performance, and sales behavior.

Smart CFOs don’t treat comp as a black box or a cost center.

“The only thing worse than overpaying is having an overly generous incentive structure where the commissionable team is not actually seeing the incentives right in front of their noses,” said Thomas Egbert, Head of Finance at Prefect. 

Leading finance teams are rethinking comp beyond a payroll line item in favor of viewing it as a direct input into CAC, LTV, gross margin, and retention. Especially in a market where the cost of capital has shifted, the most astute CFOs are trading the “grow at all costs” mindset for compensation plans that reward efficient, profitable growth.

As Ryan Macia, CFO at Osana, said, “Growing at 20% profitably is better than 100% with burn. Investors want growth and efficiency now.”

The Challenge With Comp

Still, despite more finance leaders recognizing sales comp as a powerful tool, 30% of finance and RevOps leaders say their comp plans fail to motivate reps, according to our 2024 report.  

This is often due to a lack of clarity and visibility, resulting in a missed opportunity for strategic influence and predictability in planning. When plans are buried in spreadsheets or divorced from actual outcomes, companies not only lose confidence in forecasts they also lose control of margin and motivation.

This blog will explore the lesser-known truths of sales compensation through the lens of high-performing finance teams.

We’ll unpack:

• The hidden margin risks in bloated commission structures
• How behavioral economics and visibility influence rep performance
• The CFO’s role in aligning comp plans to strategic business metrics
• Why automation and data-backed planning are no longer optional
• And the common pitfalls experienced finance leaders still make

Whether you’re building a comp plan from scratch or scaling one across a 300-person team, this blog will give you the framework and financial lens you need to treat comp like the growth lever it is.

The Hidden Costs of Sales Compensation Most CFOs Miss

While more CFOs are waking up to the strategic potential of sales compensation, many still overlook how compensation structures silently erode profitability and predictability.

It’s not just about how much you’re paying, it’s where and why that spend accrues.

Take what we call the “35% Commission Rate Trap.” 

It happens when multiple roles, like BDRs, AEs, SEs, frontline managers, and directors, are all paid on a single deal. On paper, each rate looks reasonable. However, without deal-level visibility, these layered payouts can accumulate quickly, resulting in a margin bleed that most CFOs don’t detect until it’s too late.

“You blink and you’re paying five commission rates … 5%, 10%, 3%, 1%, and it turns out you’re paying a 35% commission rate across all these people. That’s a hidden cost of commissions,” said our VP of RevOps, Sales, and Marketing, Ryan Milligan. 

This lack of visibility makes it almost impossible to assess true deal profitability, especially in team-based or multi-stage sales processes. And without centralized reporting, you can’t identify these inefficiencies until they’ve already impacted your margin.

Behavioral Economics and Sales Comp: Incentives Are Only as Good as Their Visibility

If hidden costs eat at your margin, then hidden incentives quietly erode motivation.

Following the logic of behavioral economics, an incentive only works if the person on the receiving end understands it, believes it’s achievable, and can track their progress in real time. Unfortunately, many comp plans fail at that last one.

The stat we referenced above from our 2024 Sales Compensation Trends report (30% of finance and RevOps leaders say their comp plans fail to motivate reps) is largely tied to a lack of visibility. 

If sellers can’t see how their efforts connect to earnings, compensation ceases to influence behavior.

Genevieve Moss-Hawkins , who introduced QuotaPath at NeuroFlow, saw a positive change with her team shortly after.

“The sales team loves having the ability to see their pipeline, forecast potential commissions, and understand exactly how payouts are calculated and when they’ll receive them,” said Genevieve.

Genevieve’s experience is a perfect example of how visibility reduces admin burden and how reps engage with their goals. 

By giving sellers line of sight into their pipeline, forecasted earnings, and payout timing, NeuroFlow unlocked more accountability and energy without needing to touch the comp structure itself.

The CFO’s North Star: Aligning Sales Compensation to Strategic Metrics

Visibility motivates. But alignment is what drives real business outcomes.

Once reps understand how they’re paid, the next critical question for finance leaders becomes: “Are we rewarding the right outcomes?” That’s where many comp plans fall short, especially those still locked into a “new business only” mindset.

The most strategic CFOs take it further. They use sales compensation to steer the business toward healthier metrics. Ie: gross margin, CAC efficiency, customer retention, cash flow. 

“Growing at 20% profitably is better than 100% with burn,” said Ryan Macia. “Investors want growth and efficiency now.”

That’s the North Star for finance leaders today. Rewarding top-line growth and designing comp plans that optimize how that growth is achieved.

Results of Sales Compensation Report

Watch the webinar to uncover the biggest gaps in comp planning and commission management, and get expert guidance to align Finance, RevOps, and Sales Leadership for 2024 success.

Watch Webinar

Turning Metrics Into Incentives

So what does alignment actually look like?

Here are some examples of strategic sales behaviors smart CFOs are incentivizing — and the business outcomes they support:

By shifting incentives to support these behaviors, even modestly, CFOs can significantly impact the quality of revenue, not just its quantity.

Design With the End Metric in Mind

Comp plans are often built with only the seller’s perspective in mind. But when finance leads the design, the question changes from “What will reps respond to?” to “What metrics do we need to move?”

That subtle shift makes a major difference. You start to:

• Pay more for the deals that deliver long-term value
• Avoid overpaying for revenue that hurts margins
• Design accelerators that reinforce retention, not just acquisition
  

This approach turns comp into a strategic engine.

And it’s not limited to AEs. These principles can apply to SDRs, CS teams, and even full-company variable pay when aligned to top-level goals.

The Operational Payoff: Automation, Forecasting & Audit-Readiness

Strategic alignment is powerful, but without automation, it’s hard to scale.

Once compensation plans are designed to influence the right outcomes, finance leaders face the next challenge: executing those plans accurately, repeatedly, and at scale. This is where automation becomes not just a convenience, but a necessity.

Take James Hall, EVP of Revenue at Gappify for example. As they scaled, the errors mounted up.

“I would sometimes make mistakes… There are multiple times I would go back to a rep and let them know they had actually been overpaid or underpaid,” said James. 

Manual comp processes buried in spreadsheets create friction at every level. They slow down payout cycles, increase the risk of error, block visibility, and make forecasting a painful, unreliable task. In a world where forecast accuracy and audit readiness are non-negotiables, that’s a risk most CFOs can’t afford.

That peace of mind comes from knowing comp calculations are correct, approvals are streamlined, and payment data flows directly into payroll and accounting systems, eliminating double entry, cutting time, and reducing audit exposure.

Now, James can trust automation to reduce those errors and more…

“One of the things that has been really valuable for Gappify since we implemented QuotaPath is not just the time savings for me, but the positive impact on motivation for our sales team,” said James. “They love being able to log in and see how they’re tracking and model out, ‘Hey, if I book X amount of dollars, how much can I earn this month or this quarter?’”

Forecasting: From Luxury to Table Stakes

Once automation is in place, forecasting becomes a built-in benefit. The best comp platforms allow finance to:

• Model plan changes before rollout
• Forecast payout liability by pipeline, role, or plan
• Track attainment and commission cost in real time
• Produce audit-ready reports across periods and entities

“I loved that you could model out the pipeline… I would consider it [forecasting] a requirement because it’s really powerful to look at forecasted deals,” said Thomas from Prefect, who implemented Quotapath 3+ years ago.

What Most CFOs Still Get Wrong

This is where we see Finance leaders make the biggest missteps when it comes to comp:

• Overly complex plans = underperformance: 78% of leaders say reps don’t understand their comp plans.
• Underestimating sales comp’s strategic weight: CFOs who view it purely as a cost center miss opportunities to influence margin, retention, and growth quality.
• Lack of real-time reporting: Chris Wasik (Honeycomb) notes the importance of seeing “how much we pay per dollar of revenue sold” — a critical metric many tools overlook.
  

What Smart CFOs Do Differently

So, to avoid these downfalls, focus on the following. 

The most forward-thinking CFOs don’t treat compensation as a static line item — they treat it as a strategic lever for growth. Rather than focusing solely on cost containment, they design comp plans to influence deal quality, drive desired sales behaviors, and improve overall business performance.

They obsess over visibility for finance and reps. When sellers understand exactly how they get paid, they’re more engaged, more motivated, and more likely to deliver consistent results. That’s why smart CFOs prioritize tools and processes that make earnings transparent and easy to model.

They also design comp plans with the end metric in mind. Whether the goal is to improve gross margin, increase multi-year deals, or incentivize upsells, top CFOs work backwards from the business outcome they want to achieve, then model plans to support that outcome.

Finally, they invest in automation early. Rather than waiting until the comp process becomes unmanageable, they implement systems that can scale with the business, reducing manual work, eliminating errors, and freeing up time for strategic finance.

Turn Sales Compensation into a Strategic Advantage

Join the ranks of CFOs using comp to drive better business outcomes. Talk to QuotaPath to learn how you can model, automate, and scale smarter compensation plans.

👉 Schedule a Demo

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issued a major update to income statement reporting: ASU 2024-03, Disaggregation of Income Statement Expenses (DISE) that you should know about.

This new standard requires public companies to provide a more detailed breakdown of their operating expenses, including compensation-related costs. Designed to improve transparency for investors and stakeholders, DISE represents one of the biggest shifts in financial reporting in over a decade.

The most significant impacts of DISE is the requirement to break down incentive compensation costs, including commissions and bonuses. These expenses have historically been buried within broader categories like SG&A, making them difficult to isolate, analyze, or forecast accurately. This lack of visibility has posed challenges not only for financial reporting but also for understanding how compensation strategies impact profitability and growth.

This is no small line item.

Incentive compensation can represent 30–60% of total compensation spend, according to EY’s 2024 Compensation Reporting Survey. As a result, the new disclosure requirements will greatly influence how finance teams track, report, and manage compensation going forward.

Adhere to Financial Standards

QuotaPath helps your organization stay GAAP-compliant with audit-ready financial reports. Using Ledger, you can capitalize commission expenses in accordance with ASC 340 and automate amortization to align with revenue recognition under ASC 606.

Learn More

What’s Changing Under FASB: Key Highlights

The new ASU 2024-03 (DISE) standard introduces several key disclosure requirements aimed at improving transparency in financial reporting. These updates require a more detailed view of how compensation and other operating expenses are categorized within the income statement.

• Disclosure of compensation costs by nature: Compensation costs that are reported based on the type of expense, such as base pay, commissions, and benefits, rather than grouped in a single line item.
• Tabular breakdowns by expense captions: These natural expense categories must be mapped to income statement line items like Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), Selling, General & Administrative (SG&A), and Research & Development (R&D).
• Mandatory disclosure of selling expenses and definitions: Requires that companies report the total amount spent on selling expenses and clearly define what’s included. For instance, commissions, sales team costs, or marketing-related expenses. on selling expenses, and clearly define what each of these items includes.

The standard applies to all public business entities (PBEs) for annual reporting periods beginning after December 15, 2026, and interim reports starting in 2027, with early adoption encouraged.

Who This Impacts

The new disclosure applies directly to public companies. However, late-stage, IPO-bound, and private equity–backed companies are also likely to be affected, as they prepare for public filings. Additionally, pre-IPO companies required to furnish financials under SEC regulations, such as Regulation S-X, will be impacted. A cautionary note: many private companies will be affected if acquired by a public company or if they are preparing for an IPO.

The Compliance Timeline

The new disclosure requirements take effect for annual reporting periods effective after December 15, 2026, with interim reports required starting in 2027.

While retrospective application is optional, companies should begin collecting data as early as 2025 to ensure they have sufficient historical information for comparative reporting. Waiting could create significant challenges when the rules become mandatory.

Preparing Your Org: 4 Practical Steps for Finance Leaders

Meeting the new disclosure requirements will require more than updating reports. Here are four useful steps to help prepare your organization.

Step 1: Evaluate Your Current Tracking Capabilities

Begin by assessing whether your current systems can accurately track and categorize compensation data. Do you break out commission costs by plan type? Can you distinguish between base, variable, equity, and benefits? EY’s survey found that 92% of companies currently lack adequate systems to track and report compensation at the required granularity.

Step 2: Implement a Centralized Compensation System

A unified compensation system is essential for meeting the new reporting requirements and reducing the risks of manual errors. Prioritize tools that offer automation and real-time data. This will make it easier to track, calculate, and report compensation costs accurately.

Equally important is ensuring that your compensation system integrates seamlessly with your ERP and CRM platforms, like Salesforce or HubSpot, for a unified data flow. Solutions like QuotaPath’s integration with Rippling provide end-to-end visibility, helping organizations connect compensation management with financial reporting, facilitating compliance, and operational efficiency.

Step 3: Improve Data Accuracy and Standardization

Accurate, consistent data is critical for meeting the demands of ASU 2024-03. Start by building audit trails, validation checks, and reporting templates now to ensure your compensation data is complete, consistent, and reliable.

Relying on manual processes significantly increases the risk of errors, incomplete or inaccurate disclosures, and potential audit failures. Implementing the right systems and controls early will help mitigate risks and facilitate a smoother transition to the new reporting standards.

Step 4: Align Compensation to Financial Metrics

The new reporting requirements offer an opportunity to go beyond compliance by creating visibility into how compensation impacts business performance. More accurate data enables the alignment of incentive structures with key financial metrics, such as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), Net Revenue Retention (NRR), and Gross Revenue Retention (GRR).

Tying compensation to these metrics encourages behaviors that drive long-term value creation by reducing acquisition costs, increasing retention, and boosting customer revenue. This shift supports reporting accuracy and strengthens the connection between compensation strategy and sustainable growth.

Beyond Compliance: The Strategic Advantage

With the right systems in place, real-time compensation data enables more informed business decisions. It informs forecasting, headcount planning, and resource allocation, increasing confidence in financial projections.

For instance, Adobe integrated its compensation systems into a unified platform, resulting in a 60% improvement in forecast accuracy.

Greater visibility also enables Finance to partner with Sales in driving margin-focused growth. Access to accurate compensation data allows them to develop compensation strategies that improve profit margins rather than top-line revenue.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Next, let’s talk about challenges. Take a look at these common mistakes to avoid to ensure a smoother path to compliance.

• Waiting until 2026 to prepare: Starting late leaves little time to assess your current systems, clean your data, and implement the necessary process changes.
• Using spreadsheets and email for commission tracking: Manual processes increase the risk of calculation errors, missed payments, and inaccurate reporting. They also lack the audit trails and controls needed to meet the standard’s accuracy and transparency requirements.
• Failing to align sales activities to the right expense categories: Without clearly mapping how sales activities, like commissions and bonuses, flow into financial reporting categories like COGS or SG&A, companies risk misreporting and failing audits under ASU 2024-03.
• Not documenting definitions for selling expenses: The new standard requires each company to define what qualifies as a selling expense. Failing to document this leaves room for inconsistency over time and creates confusion for auditors, stakeholders, and internal teams.

Final Thoughts: A Moment for Proactive Finance Teams

Don’t wait to act.

Start gathering the right compensation data now. Evaluate existing processes to ensure your systems can support the level of visibility and auditability required by the new standard. Start a phased implementation approach in 2025. This can help reduce risk, spread out the workload, and allow time to refine processes before the rules become mandatory.

QuotaPath builds visibility, accuracy, and flexibility in compensation management. Schedule time with a team member to see how QuotaPath can streamline the process for ASU 2024-03 compliance.

If you’ve ever built or managed a SaaS sales comp plan, you know the stakes are high.

A well-structured plan can fuel growth, align GTM teams, and retain top talent.

But too often, compensation plans become bloated, confusing, or misaligned with what actually drives your business forward. At QuotaPath, we believe the best sales comp plans are simple, logical, and fair—and that they’re tailored to how your team sells and scaled as your business grows.

In this guide, we break down proven SaaS sales compensation models by sales motion and role, highlight when to use each, and share best practices to ensure your plans motivate performance and scale with clarity.

Whether you’re a startup drafting your first AE plan or a growth-stage company evolving toward PLG and NRR-based models, this blog offers actionable templates and guidance to get comp right.

Step 1: Understand What Makes a SaaS Compensation Plan Successful

Simplicity, Logic, and Fairness

First, there are three key attributes of an effective SaaS sales comp structure: simplicity, logic, and fairness.

Simplicity, in the context of sales compensation, refers to a plan that is easy to administer and for the sales team to understand and calculate. To accomplish this, we recommend using no more than three compensation components per plan. HubSpot’s sales compensation structure provides several examples of simplicity in a SaaS sales comp structure.

Logic ensures that the compensation plan accurately reflects the company’s goals and motivates the sales team to achieve them. To create a logical compensation plan, align your plans with business goals by rewarding behaviors that drive business objectives.

Fairness means considering factors like rep performance, role, contributions, territory, and market standards when building a sales compensation plan. Then ensure quotas and OTEs are realistic and attainable.

Use this checklist to evaluate if a current plan meets these principles:

• Simple: No more than three compensation components per plan
• Logical: Plan aligns with business goals and rewards behaviors that drive key business objectives
• Fair: Quotas and OTEs are realistic and attainable

Step 2: Choose the Right Plan Based on Your Sales Motion

Second, as you approach building your comp plans, the next step is selecting a B2B SaaS commission model according to how your team sells. Aligning incentives with desired outcomes is essential to motivating software sales teams and driving business success. 

Revenue-Based Plans

A revenue-based compensation plan is a SaaS sales comp structure where a salesperson’s earnings are tied to the revenue generated by their closed deals or sales activities. It aligns sales incentives with the company’s business objectives to motivate behaviors that drive goal achievement.

• Single Rate Commission: An easy-to-understand plan that pays the same rate on every deal. This is an excellent “first” Account Executive plan for a startup, or a company expanding into a new territory, or launching a new product or service.
• Multiple Rate Bonus: offers a higher bonus amount for quota attainment or meeting criteria such as closing a specified number of deals in the predetermined period. This plan is intended to motivate and reward Account Executives who navigate high seasonality and adjusted quotas throughout the year.
• Net Revenue Retention (NRR): A plan that incentivizes Account Managers at a scaled company to expand existing accounts through upselling or to increase product adoption in PLG models.
• Gross Revenue Retention: Incentivizes Account Managers to focus on customer retention when upsell and expansion opportunities are limited in early-stage businesses.

Commission + Bonus Models

These SaaS sales comp structure types include a mix of variable pay tied to individual sales performance, plus additional bonuses for achieving specific goals or milestones. This approach is excellent for motivating software sales teams to close deals while incentivizing reps to achieve broader company objectives. 

• Accelerators: Incentives paid for exceeding sales goals, designed to motivate sales reps to sell more products or services by offering a bonus or other reward for achieving specific milestones, like 100% quota attainment. Accelerators encourage overperformance and are commonly included in a SaaS sales comp structure.
• Milestone Bonus: A set amount paid when a rep meets pre-determined stipulations. The payment criteria for these bonuses are straightforward. Reps only earn the bonus when they meet or exceed the stipulated goal. Otherwise, they receive nothing. This can lead to sandbagging, so we recommend pairing a milestone bonus with a commission plan to minimize this issue.
• Cliff: The minimum sales level a rep must achieve before they qualify to earn commissions according to the sales incentive plan. Also known as a commission floor, this compensation plan element can effectively motivate salespeople to attain designated key performance metrics.

Remember that to really see success with your comp plan model, regardless of the structure you move forward with, you have to provide your reps with visibility into their plans and progress. Enabling reps to track their progress with an application like QuotaPath keeps them motivated.

According to Genevieve of NeuroFlow, “The sales team loves having the ability to see their pipeline, forecast potential commissions, and understand exactly how payouts are calculated and when they’ll receive them.”

Usage-Based or Activity-Based Plans

The following are examples of comp plans for product-led growth or hybrid motions. “Despite the fundamental differences between traditional and usage-based pricing models, the underlying principles of sales compensation remain consistent. Both models involve determining the optimal balance between base pay and variable compensation, aiming to motivate sales reps to drive revenue growth,” Graham Collins said.

• Usage-Based: Reward salespeople based on the volume or value of product or service their customers consume, naturally aligning with a product-led growth (PLG) motion. This B2B SaaS commission model encourages sales reps to focus on long-term customer success and expansion.
  
  “By correlating sales compensation directly to customer usage, companies can foster a customer-centric sales culture and drive sustainable revenue growth,” according to Graham Collins.
  
• Activity-Based: Rewards salespeople for completing specific sales activities, such as making calls, setting appointments, or sending proposals, and is designed to motivate sales reps to prioritize activities that lead to closed deals. Align sales incentives with user engagement, product adoption, and value realization instead of closed deals or upfront revenue with a PLG motion.
  
  Example: “Pay reps $100 for every product-qualified lead (PQL) converted.”
  

Step 3: Align Plans with Roles on Your Team

Next, you have to match the plans to the roles of your team.

Each sales role has distinct responsibilities and contributions in the sales process. Tailoring compensation to roles ensures incentives are relevant and effective for motivating software sales teams’ performance, driving desired behaviors, and achieving business goals. 

For New Business Reps (SDRs, BDRs)

Activity-based plans encourage new business reps to complete desired activities aligned with organizational goal achievement.

• Activity-based pay: Rewards salespeople for performing specific sales activities, such as demos booked, calls made, or new qualified opportunities created. For instance, a new business rep earns $50 per qualified meeting they schedule, plus $200 per sales qualified lead (SQL). This encourages reps to focus on prospects aligned with prospects who match buyer personas most likely to purchase your product or service.

• Activity Based + Closed Won Commission: Adding a closed/won commission encourages new business reps to engage with quality leads by rewarding them with a percentage of every opportunity they create that results in a purchase. For example, using the Qualified Opportunity Bonus + Close Won Commission plan a rep could earn $100 for each opportunity generated plus a 2% commission for each closed/won deal.

For Account Executives

Select a SaaS quota-based compensation plan designed to motivate account executives to prioritize deals that drive business goals and encourage overperformance.

• Commission with Accelerators: A tiered commission structure, commonly adopted by SaaS businesses, designed to reward overperformance by enabling reps to earn a higher percentage on sales closed once they hit quota.
• Commission with Accelerators and Decelerators: A three-tiered B2B SaaS commission model for organizations selling products that are unaffected by seasonal shifts in buyer behavior. This plan includes accelerators for motivating software sales teams to overperform, decelerators for demotivating poor performance by discouraging reps from closing less profitable deals.
• Commission with Multi-Year Accelerators: Incentivizes reps for exceeding quota and for selling multi-year contracts. For example, an account executive on this plan earns a 10% commission of 1-year deals they close, 15% of 2-year deals, and 20% of 3-year deals.

For Customer Success & Renewals

Customer success and account managers typically handle renewals and expansions. The SaaS sales comp structure you select for your team should align with your current goals and priorities.

• GRR-Based: This plan keeps account managers focused on customer retention. It is well suited for companies with consistent pricing and minimal upsell or expansion opportunities.
• NRR-based: An NRR-focused compensation plan makes most sense for scaled organizations or those with product-led growth (PLG) strategies. This model incentivizes account managers to grow their existing book of business rather than retaining every customer, and it is well-suited for organizations with product-led growth strategies or ones that are scaled.
• GRR and NRR: This SaaS sales comp structure encourages account managers to balance their attention between retention and upsells and expansion, often evenly splitting the variable components 50/50 between GRR and NRR. For instance, account managers might receive a 2% bonus on expansion revenue after their retention threshold is met.

Step 4: Build a Scalable, Transparent Comp Plan

Lastly, build a plan that can scale. Specifically, one that can scale without sacrificing clarity.

Here are a few best practices to help with your sales compensation planning. A scalable comp plan starts with simplicity and alignment to company goals. Keep plans short, clear, and easy to explain. As AJ Bruno, QuotaPath’s CEO, puts it: “Plans should be so simple that someone could explain it to you in about 15 seconds.”

Set realistic quotas, introduce plans before the new year, and ensure reps understand how and when they get paid.

These fundamentals connect teams across sales, RevOps, finance, and leadership. Transparency is just as critical. Clear commission rules and real-time visibility build trust, drive retention, and reduce confusion.

“The whole reason we bought a platform was because we’re scaling,” said David Taub, Senior Director of Revenue Operations at Hydrocorp. “As I see more things rolled out, there’s more functionality I can continue to put into QuotaPath… it just gives a singular place for everybody to go get compensation truth and transparency.”

Tools like QuotaPath, integrated with your CRM, help automate this process, eliminate errors, and ensure every rep can track earnings in real time.

Try Pre-Built Compensation Templates with QuotaPath

Not sure where to start? QuotaPath’s Compensation Plan Library offers dozens of pre-built SaaS compensation plans that match a variety of sales motions and roles. You can also create and customize plans quickly with our AI-Powered Plan Builder, helping you save time and reduce errors.

Want to see it in action? Book a demo with our team to explore how QuotaPath can streamline comp planning and improve payout transparency.

As companies prepare for the second half of the fiscal year, the topic of sales compensation planning becomes a pressing priority. QuotaPath recently hosted a webinar addressing this topic, featuring an experienced panel comprising representatives from Finance, RevOps, and Sales.

The result? A candid and tactical conversation about what signals it’s time to update your plan, how to manage change effectively, and what traps to avoid.

Full Webinar

Adjusting Sales Comp Plans for H2: What’s Worth Changing

Watch Recording

Meet the Panel

Hosted by Ryan Milligan, our VP of RevOps, Sales, and Marketing, the webinar brought together:

• Anne Pao, Founder & CEO, Ignite Consulting – a RevOps and fractional CRO expert with deep experience across comp plan design for companies of all sizes.
  
• Ryan Macia, CFO at Osano – a seasoned finance leader in B2B SaaS with prior tenure at QuotaPath.
  
• Jon Rydberg, Founder, Align Advisory Group – a GTM veteran and former CRO, with 16+ years across tech sales roles.
  

This trio represented the trifecta of stakeholders that every effective compensation planning committee needs: Finance, RevOps, and Sales.

“If you don’t have those three people talking, that’s advice piece number one,” said Ryan Milligan.

When to Adjust Your Comp Plan

According to Ryan Macia, Finance should start evaluating comp plans when there’s a misalignment between actual performance and plan expectations.

“The obvious signals are a widening gap between performance and your plan,” said Ryan Macia. “But to really get at comp issues, you need segmentation—win rates by product, channel, or geo. That’s how you start seeing if compensation is part of the problem.”

Once you’ve identified a gap, don’t dive into spreadsheets immediately. Anne Pao recommends a discovery process rooted in transparency and direct feedback.

“One of the first things I do is a ‘roadshow’ with the sales team to understand what they find confusing or demotivating. I also survey Finance, RevOps, and Sales. That data becomes the foundation of the redesign,” said Anne.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls

A major risk in comp plan changes? Operating in a silo.

The panel agreed this often leads to “black box” plans that reps don’t understand or trust.

“I’ve had reps not realize they made more on two-year deals—because the comp plan was written in ‘German.’ Once I made it clear, one rep sold a two-year deal the next week!” said Anne.

And Jon Rydberg highlighted how the problem might not be your comp plan at all:

“You have to ask—is this a rep problem, an enablement issue, or a quota problem? Don’t just assume it’s the plan. Look at activity, coaching, conversion rates, and even market fit,” said Jon.

How to Roll Out Changes

Once the need for change is clear, how you communicate and implement is critical.

“The head of sales should own the rollout, and managers should meet 1:1 with reps to walk through how they can hit 130% of quota,” said Jon. “Tie it to their income goals, and keep it simple.”

Macia emphasized the importance of aligning changes with business objectives, noting that many plans still fail to reward behaviors such as long-term value or gross revenue retention.

“Cash receipt comp plans might make sense if cash is your number one priority. But if you’re trying to incentivize growth, you need better levers—like clawbacks and accelerators that reps understand,” said Macia.

Final Thoughts

If you’re entering H2 with a sense that something isn’t working, you’re not alone.

This panel proved that most companies struggle with the same core issues:

• Misalignment between plan design and business metrics
• Complexity that creates confusion for reps
• Failure to coordinate across Finance, Sales, and RevOps
  

QuotaPath exists to solve these challenges with tools that bring clarity and automation to compensation planning. Whether you’re tweaking quotas, launching accelerators, or overhauling your plan entirely, keep your cross-functional team aligned and your reps informed.

“Comp should never be a mystery. If you want to drive behavior, show them how to win,” said Anne.

According to the 2024 Sales Compensation Plan Report, 78% of revenue leaders said their sales reps find it difficult to understand their compensation plans. Poorly designed or executed compensation plans can reduce motivation, delay payouts, and frustrate both administrators and representatives alike. The evolving complexity of hybrid sales models, tiered quotas, and non-linear deal cycles demands more adaptable solutions.

As companies scale, their compensation plans add complexities and greater challenges, including:

• Reps unsure where to focus their efforts
• Distrust between Finance and Sales.
• Ops struggles to adjust poor-performing plans
• 91% of organizations missed quota expectations
• 60% of reps take 3 to 6 months to understand their plan
• 39% of leaders admit their comp plans contradict business targets

While platforms like CaptivateIQ aim to modernize compensation management, they may not suit every company. According to reviews on G2 and Capterra and customers who came to QuotaPath after using CaptivateIQ, some users report challenges when comparing QuotaPath vs CaptivateIQ. These issues include steep learning curves, reliance on support for changes, and high implementation lift for smaller teams or fast-moving orgs when using CaptivateIQ. 

Why Teams Explore CaptivateIQ Alternatives

There are several common reasons why organizations begin evaluating CaptivateIQ alternatives. CaptivateIQ’s lengthy implementation time motivates businesses that need a faster time to value to consider other options. Similarly, teams that prefer self-service plan creation are frustrated by the constant need for support to build and manage comp plans in CaptivateIQ.

CaptivateIQ pricing, like its platform, is complex and adds up, according to some G2 reviewers. Teams that desire more flexible pricing or packaging pursue CaptivateIQ alternatives. Likewise, teams preferring simplicity often wish for improved usability and reporting for non-technical users, causing them to explore other sales commission software options.

In this blog, we’ll explore top CaptivateIQ alternatives, including QuotaPath vs Xactly, Spiff, Performio, and Everstage, breaking down their core features, benefits, and ideal fit so you can choose the right solution for your RevOps tech stack.

CaptivateIQ Alternatives and Competitors Summary

The following table offers an overview of top commission automation tools for teams exploring CaptivateIQ alternatives.

Price Comparison

Transparent pricing models that disclose implementation or support fees, minimum user floors, and a free trial simplify the selection process without creating additional work for buyers. CaptivateIQ pricing lacks transparency, like most sales commission software alternatives, with one exception: QuotaPath. Here’s where each of the CaptivateIQ alternatives stands.

Continue reading to learn more about each platform.

QuotaPath

Key features:

• AI-Powered Plan Builder
• Free Trial experience
• Only push integration to Rippling
• Performance Analytics & Reporting
• Award-Winning Support Access
• Native CRM & Payroll Integrations
• Fast Onboarding and Time to Value
• Automated Commission Calculations

Everstage

Key features: 

• Automated Commission Tracking
• Seamless CRM & Payroll Integrations
• Real-Time Rep Visibility
• Flexible Plan Customization
• Performance Analytics & Reporting

Xactly

Key features: 

• Automated Commission Calculations
• CRM Integrations
• Real-Time Rep Visibility
• Support Access
• Flexible Plan Customization

Spiff

Key features:

• Performance Analytics & Reporting
• Automated Commission Calculations
• Multi-Level Payout Approvals
• Flexible Plan Customization
• Real-Time Rep Visibility

Varicent

Key features: 

• Automated Commission Calculations
• Seamless CRM & Payroll Integrations
• Flexible Plan Customization
• Ease of Use
• Performance Analytics & Reporting

Final Thoughts

As you explore the CapitvateIQ alternatives to meet your commission automation needs, consider ease of use, support reliability, and pricing transparency. These factors simplify the selection process while boosting adoption and long-term value.

Schedule a demo to see how QuotaPath compares.

RevOps leaders are transforming Slack from a messaging app into a full-blown operating system…automating tasks, reducing tech bloat, accelerating approvals, and even tracking leads in real-time. 

And let’s be real, some leaders joke about “always being away” or fantasize about deleting the app altogether. (“Can we include ‘Don’t Use Slack’ as an option?” said Tyler Patrick in the RevOps Co-op Slack channel, while Alex Knechtl admitted, “Status is always set to ‘Away.’”) 

However, despite the sarcasm and the fact that these quotes originated from Slack threads in professional networking communities, these leaders depend on Slack more than they’d like to admit.

We spoke with RevOps leaders to learn some of the most unique and high-leverage ways they’re using Slack. 

Recommended Reading

How To Become A Strategic Revops Leader: An Interview With Katherine Zhang

Take Me to Blog

1. CRM-Powered Deal Alerts, Right Where You Work

Used by: Nearly every high-velocity sales org

Integrate your CRM with Slack to receive instant updates when:

• A new deal is created
• A stage changes
• A deal closes
  

Why it matters: These alerts keep sales, customer success, and finance teams in sync—no chasing down status updates.

2. KPI & Goal Tracking Channels

Popular among: Performance-driven RevOps leaders

Slack posts pull in data from Salesforce, HubSpot, Looker, or Tableau to track:

• Weekly meetings booked
• Pipeline vs. targets
• Sales velocity metrics
  

It’s common to see dedicated channels like #kpi-tracker or #weekly-performance with automated updates. This results in transparency, better-informed reps, and a subtle nudge of friendly competition.

3. Lead Routing Alerts

Example: Automatically notify reps about new inbound leads

Slack becomes a lightweight lead router by:

• Tagging reps in real time
• Including lead source, contact info, and qualifying details
• Triggering SLAs through emoji reactions
  

The best part? No rep ever says, “I didn’t see the lead.” (Well, unless they mute the channel, oop.)

4. Pipeline Hygiene Nudges

RevOps teams use Slack bots or CRM triggers to:

• Remind reps to update deal stages
• Flag stalled opportunities
• Surface missing next steps
  

No need to chase reps over email. Just let Slack do the automatic nudging.

5. Discount & Deal Exception Approvals

Use Slack as a lightweight deal desk:

• Reps request discounts via forms or threads
• Managers approve using emoji reactions or Slack forms
• Context from CRM is automatically included
  

It saves time and avoids approval bottlenecks in email chains.

6. Win-Loss Insights on the Fly

Post auto-summaries of:

• Gong snippets
• Deal attribution notes
• CRM context and call links
  

Sales, RevOps, and enablement teams can learn in real time. No need to schedule formal reviews.

7. Daily Executive Digest

Slack delivers:

• Pipeline summaries
• Forecast deltas
• Rep attainment
  

These Slack digests replace dashboards for many execs, who prefer to stay informed without logging into three platforms.

8. Cross-Team Collaboration Channels

Create structured channels like:

• #deal-desk
• #comp-plan-feedback
• #revops-requests
  

Add lightweight workflows or link requests to Asana or Jira tickets. It keeps things moving and prevents requests from slipping through the cracks.

9. Onboarding & Ramp Alerts

New reps trigger Slack alerts when:

• They book their first meeting
• Close their first deal
• Complete LMS certifications
  

It makes recognition visible and ensures managers stay looped in.

10. Revenue Fire Drills

Used by: Fast-moving GTM teams

Slack alerts are triggered by:

• Churn risk signals
• Inactivity (no emails/calls in 7+ days)
• Forecast slippage
  

Mahak Vedi, RevOps leader, shared how her team ties Slack into almost every ops workflow:

RevOps uses tools like Catalyst or Vitally to notify AEs, managers, and CS leaders before it’s too late.

Bonus: A Startup That Runs Everything Through Slack

• Create Asana tasks directly from Slack
• Inbound leads are piped into dedicated channels
• A partner sends Slack alerts when someone visits their page, including name, title, and LinkedIn
  

Slack Isn’t Just Chat for RevOps.

Slack might not be built for RevOps, but that hasn’t stopped RevOps teams from making it work for them.

From automation to insights to approvals, RevOps is transforming Slack into a true operations command center. So while the occasional Slack detox might be tempting, it turns out the most innovative GTM teams are leaning in, and getting more done because of it.

Looking for more ways to automate your sales and revenue operations?

Start with QuotaPath’s integrations to keep your CRM, compensation, and payroll aligned.