Your Comp Model Is Sending a Message. Make Sure It's the Right One.

This one shows up in almost every sales organisation I’ve ever worked with, and a number I’ve worked within.

You built a comp model back when the team was five people and everyone was out hunting new client logos for the website. The team's fifty now (sometimes a lot more), and that same model is still running the show. Reps still get paid to win new business. Meanwhile half your revenue opportunity - in a lot of cases much more than half - is sitting in the customer base you already have, waiting for someone who's actually paid to go after it.

Nobody's incentivised to grow accounts. Retention isn't really measured. And the reps who are genuinely good at farming tend to leave, because the plan keeps telling them they're worth less than the hunters.

The plan isn't wrong about what the company values. That's the problem.

Why do comp models age so badly?

A model built for a five-person hunting team starts creaking at fifteen. By fifty it's going to start working against you.

The reason is simple enough. Early on, growth is almost all new customer acquisition, so paying for new business makes complete sense. Then the mix changes. Your installed base turns into a serious revenue source - often the biggest one - through expansion and renewals and all the work of keeping customers around. Now you need hunters and farmers both, doing their jobs well. But a model built only for hunters means the farmers either never get hired, or don't hang around long enough to matter.

Put yourself in the seat of a rep who's good at this stuff - growing accounts, working renewals, spotting the expansion nobody else noticed. They look at a plan that pays mainly for new business and reach the obvious conclusion.. this place doesn't value what I'm best at. The ones with options go somewhere that does. Those who stay learn what gets rewarded and quietly adjust.

Hard to blame them. They're reading in between the tea leaves accurately.

What is your comp model actually saying?

A comp model is the clearest statement a company ever makes about what it actually values. Not what leadership says at the all-hands. What it backs with money.

So when the plan only incentivises new customer acquisition, and account management gets handed a scorecard with no real earning potential behind it, the team gets the message loud and clear. They hunt. The accounts get whatever's left over.

And then a pattern sets in, and it's a predictable one. CS inherits accounts that were sold without proper qualification, because sales was never paid to qualify anyone out. Retention turns into a CS problem alone, because the commercial team was never built to own it. Expansion gets treated as a nice surprise you notice when not looking rather than something you actually plan for. And because none of that growth shows up from the existing base, the pressure swings back onto new acquisition - which gets harder and more expensive every quarter as your ICP starts to drift.

It compounds. The compounding is the part most people underestimate until they're living in it.

So why doesn't anyone change it?

Because the broken version is predictable, and predictable feels safe when the board is watching revenue.

A model that's been running three years produces numbers you can count on. Finance can forecast against it. Leadership knows roughly what it costs. Changing it means real uncertainty for a while - reps learning new mechanics, some attrition, a quarter or two where the numbers get harder to read and harder to explain upward.

So the model stays. Not because it's working - because it's predictable, and predictable usually wins out over the discomfort of getting it right.

Honestly, I've sat in the room where this exact decision doesn't get made, and I understood why. A misaligned comp model costs you slowly and quietly. Fixing it costs you fast and in full view of everyone. That asymmetry makes the wrong call feel like the safe one, and most leaders watching the same revenue line will make the safe one.

The slow cost is still real though, and it keeps stacking up. The longer a bad model runs, the more it shapes the team around it - who leaves, who stays, which skills get sharpened, which habits get rewarded. Two years of the wrong incentives doesn't unwind in a quarter.

The conversation that actually moves it

The hard part of fixing a comp model was never the modelling. That bit's mechanical. You run the scenarios, stress-test the numbers, lay the options on the table. The hard part is the conversation about why the old model lasted this long without anyone seriously questioning it.

That conversation usually turns up something uncomfortable. The model was comfortable. It threw off numbers you could defend. Changing it means admitting the company had been paying for the wrong priorities, and that leadership let it run.

Not an easy thing to say out loud. It's also the thing that makes the redesign actually hold, because once the team understands why it's changing, and not just what's changing, you get buy-in instead of a slow drip of resignations.

What does a good comp model look like?

One that knows where its revenue actually comes from, and puts real earning potential that builds excitement across all of it.

New business and account growth both count as genuine opportunities. Retention has commercial accountability attached, not just a CS dashboard and good intentions. And the people doing the farming feel every bit as valued as the people doing the hunting, because the money tells them they are.

Get that right and you keep your best account managers. CS stops carrying commercial weight with no commercial support. The new customer pipeline stops being asked to hold up more than it was ever built to, especially as you gain significant market share in your category.

None of it happens without the uncomfortable conversation first.

When the signal hasn't changed for years, people stop waiting for you to fix it - they just read between the lines and start acting on what they find.