Compensation
GTM or GTFO | We Optimize Everything Except The One Thing That Actually Drives Behavior
Stop Optimizing Everything Except the One Thing That Actually Drives Rep Behavior
I love helping friends who have great products I use. This one is about QuotaPath and their new launch - Atlas. Design, launch, and optimize comp plans with AI-backed confidence, then watch your reps actually perform. Check it out.
Ask a CRO or Founder to show you their comp plan, explain why it’s structured the way it is, and walk you through how they’ll know if it’s working.
I bet one in ten can answer all three questions. The rest know what the plan says but they have no idea whether it’s connected to anything that actually matters. They aren’t sure if it’s actually driving or hurting performance.
After 25 years across a lot of sales orgs, if I had to name the single thing I’ve seen consistently break revenue growth more than bad messaging, weak pipeline, or the wrong ICP, it’s comp plans that were built on a napkin or a copied template.
For some reason many leaders never have time to fix them or don’t actually believe they make a big difference. They make a huge difference.
How Comp Plans Actually Get Built
Q4 planning kicks off. Finance locks the numbers. RevOps builds the model. Leadership spends six weeks arguing about accelerators. Legal reviews. HR approves.
By the time the plan hits reps’ inboxes in January, the market has shifted, two key customers have churned, and you are debating adjusting ICP.
Your comp plan is not reflective of reality anymore. Now you have reps optimizing for fantasy land. The CEO is wondering why reps are behaving one way when the strategy says another. The answer to that is your crappy outdated comp plan.
Why The Infrastructure Has Always Been Missing
Many of the companies I work with as a fractional CRO are early stage and mid size companies and they move fast.They do the best they can with what they have: usually a spreadsheet, a gut feeling, and someone else’s template.
No benchmarks. No modeling. No visibility into whether the plan is actually driving the revenue outcomes they want.
This is not incompetence. This stuff is hard. But they are lacking a system to make it easier. The tools that existed before were built to track commissions after the fact, not to help you design a plan that connects compensation to behavior before reps ever start selling.
Here’s What Atlas Does
QuotaPath built Atlas as an AI revenue strategist trained on tens of thousands of real comp plans and revenue outcomes to give you market-calibrated recommendations. I can ask whether the draw policy makes sense for a new-hire ramp (see image). Whether the accelerator structure I am thinking of will reward the right behavior and if my plan is accidentally punishing the people I need most. It models plan changes before you push them live, and connects your plan to outcomes so you can measure performance. Maybe best of all, when something is off, you are told about it.
Here’s your full compensation and performance loop. Design it in Atlas, push live in QuotaPath, your performance data flows back in, you see what’s working, you make smart adjustments and most of all reps have full visibility into what they’re earning and chasing. That’s your GTM Comp System.
The Rep Side Of This Matters A Lot.
Here is how you destroy morale. A rep has a strong quarter, the math doesn’t add up the way they expected, and they are disappointed and frustrated and now there’s a trust problem.
It’s almost never because someone was dishonest but the fact that the plan was ambiguous and nobody had visibility into how earnings were calculated didn’t help.
You can lose good people over that. Comp disputes are rarely about the money, they happen due to lack of clarity and poor communication.
When reps know exactly what they’re being paid for and what they’re working toward, with a full breakdown of every component and a clear view of forecasted earnings, they perform differently. That sounds obvious. It’s surprisingly rare in practice.
The Bar For Comp Has Been Embarrassingly Low
We spend enormous energy optimizing the top of the funnel and we track it all obsessively (as we should) - Messaging, positioning, outbound sequences, discovery frameworks.
But maybe our biggest revenue lever is sent in a PDF file and a quick zoom call and never discussed again until they get (or don’t get) the commission they expected.
The companies that have figured out how to make comp a revenue driving lever will outperform everyone else still copying templates from Bob in their GTM community.
GTM is your only moat. Get it right. Or GTFO.
P.S If this was valuable, please share it , post it, comment on it, or DM me. GTM or GTFO comes out every Tuesday. See you next week.
Why GTM or GTFO Exists: The GTM is bar is low - big talkers, best practices and bullshit. Being elite is your moat. Do the work that matters and get sh!t done.