Misaligned incentives, confusing structures and outdated systems quietly siphon money from your company daily. Oh sure, the comp plan technically makes sense — once you cross-reference five spreadsheets, decipher three footnotes and solve a riddle from the finance team.

If you’ve ever felt like your compensation strategy isn’t quite delivering the ROI you expected, you’re not alone.

Let’s explore the three most common commission planning problems that drain tight budgets with complicated comp plans and misaligned territory planning and hold back growth with outdated applications and spreadsheets. The good news is that it’s not too late to fix them.

1. Overcomplicated compensation structures

Your sales plan shouldn’t require a Rosetta Stone to interpret. If it does, don’t be surprised when your reps start asking ChatGPT what their bonus is.

“You’ve got to make it easy to understand,” said Erik Charles, GTM expert and RevOps advisor. “For instance, let’s say we’re pitching a $250,000 project with an automatic renewal for three years and $50,000 in implementation fees. How much will you make if you close that this month? If your sales reps can’t easily answer that question, you’re wasting incentive dollars.”

Complexity kills motivation. It slows down sales cycles, lowers rep satisfaction and leads to costly errors.

If reps spend more time decoding their comp plan than talking to customers, congratulations — you’ve just implemented the world’s least-fun escape room. (Cue the zombies and tense music!)

The key is to simplify. Align plans to a few clear, controllable levers. If it can’t be explained in under 60 seconds, it’s too complex.

2. Quota and territory misalignment

It was the stat that rocked the sales world: Ninety-one percent of sales teams whiffed their sales quotas last year. When sales leaders fail to factor in market potential, territory saturation or historical performance when calculating sales quotas, teams will surely miss targets, territories will fall off balance and high performers will look for new opportunities elsewhere.

“Growth without efficiency is chaos. Efficiency without growth is stagnation,” said Rob Levey, RevOps advisor, referring to the Pareto Principle, which posits that the top 20% of sales reps generate more than 75% of a company’s total revenue.

“These are the reps who consistently overachieve on quota, bring in your most valuable customers and become the aspirational benchmark for the rest of the team,” Levey said. “So why wouldn’t you want to make sure these reps are always working the most promising opportunities? Traditionally, you couldn’t just swap in your top closer at the last minute — deals have history, and so do customer relationships.”

But advances in RevOps and artificial-intelligence-powered platforms equip sales teams with data-driven territory models to align quotas based on fair and balanced segmentation, account scoring and historical insights.

3. Manual commission tracking and payout errors

In an environment where most departments can’t agree on most things, a Quotapath survey found that all RevOps leaders (that’s right, 100%) agree that compensation plans leave plenty of room for improvement, and 78% reported that their sales reps have complained that their comp plans are hard to understand.

One typo can trigger an avalanche of errors if you still rely on spreadsheets or outdated systems to track commissions. Sales reps lose trust. Finance teams scramble to fix payouts. Legal risks grow with every underpaid or overpaid check.

Automate your commission process with software that ensures accuracy, transparency and auditability. Real-time visibility is a key factor in this. If your leadership team can’t see what’s happening with commissions in real time, you can’t be sure if incentives are working or when you’ve hit the budget. Reactive management can’t adjust fast enough to prevent overspending or underperformance.

Fullcast simplifies compensation plans by replacing spreadsheets with AI-sourced automation built for scale. Instead of manually managing complex rules and payout logic, Fullcast lets you design, assign and adjust comp plans in real time. With AI, users can identify and plan inefficiencies, flag anomalies and optimize incentives based on performance data, so you’re always motivating the most strategic behavior.

With built-in guardrails and seamless integration into your RevOps stack, Fullcast turns compensation planning from a quarterly headache into a strategic growth lever.

Commission planning should drive performance, not incite quota hysteria

Yes, your compensation strategy is a financial tool, but it also drives behavior, motivation and performance. However, it’s only effective if built on a foundation of clarity, alignment and data-driven insight. By adopting automated, AI-sourced support, aligning incentives based on data and eliminating manual guesswork, you can transform your compensation strategy into what it was always meant to be: a clear, motivating engine for growth.

The money’s on the table — now’s the time to make sure you’re not leaving any behind.

J’Nel Wright is a content writer at Fullcast, a Silicon Slopes-based, end-to-end RevOps platform that allows companies to design, manage and track the performance of their revenue-generating teams.