Commission plans shape how sales teams behave.
But most of today’s comp structures are inherited—not innovated.
To design better systems, we need to understand how we got here.
Here’s a timeline of the evolution of sales commission plans—and what it tells us about where RevOps needs to go next.
🕰️ 1850s: The Traveling Salesman Era
- Sales reps are lone wolves on trains and horses
- Paid a percentage of goods sold—no base, no benefits
- Incentives are simple: sell more, earn more
📚 Rooted in pure variable pay—commission as survival
📇 1920s–1950s: The Rise of the National Sales Force
- Mass-market products and brand marketing take off
- Companies standardize territories, quotas, and tiered commissions
- Sales contests emerge as early SPIFs (“Win a Cadillac!”)
📚 Influenced by Taylorism and early industrial management theory
💡 Sales = efficiency + charm
📈 1960s–1980s: The Era of Activity-Based Selling
- CRM predecessors appear (Rolodex, phone logs, call sheets)
- Managers track activity, but commissions still based on revenue closed
- Base salaries become more common—especially in B2B
📚 Enter management control theory: oversight meets incentives
💡 Incentives reward output, but inputs are now tracked
💻 1990s–2000s: CRM + Comp Complexity
- CRMs like Siebel, then Salesforce, change how performance is tracked
- Quotas become more granular (monthly, weekly, per-product)
- Comp plans balloon: draw systems, clawbacks, accelerators, decelerators
📚 Rise of the “Excel Era” in RevOps
💡 The spreadsheet is now the comp plan’s best friend—and worst enemy
📉 2010s: The “Quota = Culture” Era
- Tech sales booms. Startups go aggressive with variable-heavy plans
- The 50/50 split becomes gospel: 50% base, 50% on-target variable
- Burnout rises. Attrition spikes. Sandbagging and gaming increase.
📚 Behavioral economics gains traction—motivation ≠ money alone
💡 We begin to question whether quotas drive performance or panic
🤖 2020s: The Shift Toward Science (and Sanity)
- COVID accelerates digital transformation—and exposes broken comp
- AI and analytics enter incentive design
- Focus shifts to:
✅ Transparency
✅ Real-time visibility
✅ Behavioral alignment
✅ Risk-adjusted goals
✅ Comp plans that reward more than just closed-won
📚 Influenced by modern motivation science: autonomy, mastery, purpose (Deci & Ryan; Pink)
💡 Leaptree Incentivize and similar platforms emerge to make incentives scalable, adaptive, and human
🚀 The Future: From Control to Coaching
Sales comp isn’t going away.
But the future isn’t just about higher quotas or shinier bonuses.
The future is about:
- Tying comp to customer value
- Rewarding behaviors, not just outcomes
- Making plans transparent, explainable, and evolvable
- Designing with psychology, not just math
Incentives aren’t a lever to control behavior.
They’re a system to shape culture.
RevOps leaders aren’t just building comp plans.
They’re building trust.
📚 References
- Taylor, F. W. (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management.
- Pink, D. H. (2009). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
- Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior.
- Harvard Business Review (2022). Why Sales Compensation Plans Fail—and How to Fix Them.
- Gartner (2023). The Future of Sales Compensation Design.