The first sales comp plan you will not rewrite in six months

Most first sales comp plans get rewritten before the person they were written for is fully ramped. Rarely because the business changed. Usually because the plan was assembled out of a salary the founder could afford and a commission rate that sounded about right, and nobody decided what it was buying.

I have written about hiring your first salesperson too early and about coaching a seller you cannot out-sell. This is the piece between them, and it is the one that usually gets handed to an accountant: what you pay the person, and what you pay them to do.

The Bridge Group's 2026 research across 158 B2B companies puts the median account executive quota at 4.6 times on-target earnings, up from 4.2 in 2024, and median time to full productivity at 6.2 months, the longest in that research's history. Forty-eight percent of sellers hit their annual number, down from 51 percent. Those are United States figures and your dollars will be smaller, but the ratios travel, and they say something awkward: most sellers on these plans miss, so yours has to still make sense when your seller does.

Start from the quota, not the salary

The usual order is to settle on a salary, add a commission rate, and hope the two meet somewhere sensible. Reverse it.

Say you offer NZ$70,000 base and NZ$50,000 of variable pay, so NZ$120,000 on target. At four times that, deliberately under the 4.6 median for a first hire, the seller carries NZ$480,000 of new revenue. At a 70 percent gross margin that is NZ$336,000 of gross profit against NZ$120,000 of pay, a ratio you can defend to a board.

Then sanity-check the job rather than the arithmetic. Can one person find and close NZ$480,000 of new business in your market, in a year, at your deal size? At an average first-year contract of NZ$25,000 that is nineteen new customers. At NZ$120,000 it is four. Those are two different jobs, and they are two different people. SEEK's advertised averages in New Zealand sit at about NZ$90,000 for an account manager and NZ$105,000 for a business development manager, so the base is the easy part to price. The quota is the harder half to get right.

What should the plan actually pay for?

Pay for the part the seller controls, and for nothing else.

New business they sourced or closed belongs in the plan. Renewals on accounts you won before they arrived do not, however tempting it is to use them to soften a thin first year. Pay commission on that revenue once and you have bought yourself an expensive account manager and lost a salesperson. Activity does not belong there either. Calls, meetings and demos are things you manage, not things you buy.

Whatever you pay for is what you get more of next year. Read your draft back and ask what it is ordering.

Split it so it survives a bad quarter

Pointer Strategy, which reads advertised pay across Australia and New Zealand, finds a median advertised split of 60 percent base to 40 percent variable for account executive roles, with the middle half between 55 and 70 percent base. About one ad in ten mentions uncapped commission.

For a first seller, sit at the base-heavy end of that. Sixty-forty, or seventy-thirty if there is no proven pipeline for them to work. Your first salesperson is carrying risk that a seller joining an established team is not: no referenceable pipeline, a product story that still changes, and a founder who has closed every deal so far. A 50/50 split hands that risk to the person least able to price it, and the people who accept it are usually the ones with no better offer.

Write the ramp down before you need it

If the median seller takes six months to reach full productivity, a full-year quota applied from day one is a plan that breaks in month four. Write the ramp in at the start, when it is a provision, rather than in month four, when it reads as a bailout.

A shape that holds up: months one to three, commission paid at target regardless of what closes. Months four to six, half quota. Month seven, the full number. Then say when commission is earned, because that is the clause that causes the most arguments: on signature, on invoice, or on cash received. Pick one.

Three things to decide once, in writing

Caps and accelerators. Decide now whether the plan pays more per dollar above target and whether anything is capped. Capping a first seller in their best quarter is the cheapest way to lose them.

Clawback. If a customer cancels inside ninety days, does the commission come back? Decide before it happens rather than after.

The deals you close together. You will be in some of those rooms, and your seller knows it. Agree the split while it is still hypothetical.

None of this needs a long document. One page, four numbers and three rules will outlast most of what gets written, because what forces a rewrite is almost never the commission rate. It is a question nobody answered when the plan was written.

So read your draft one more time. If your seller hits every number in it, are you better off?

Sources. Quota multiple, ramp and attainment: The Bridge Group, "AE Models, Motions & Metrics: 2026 Research Report", published 23 June 2026 on a sample of 158 B2B companies, which reports a median account executive quota of 4.6 times on-target earnings against 4.2 in 2024, median time to full productivity of 6.2 months, described as the highest in the history of that research, and 48 percent of account executives attaining annual quota against 51 percent in 2024. Those figures are United States weighted, which is why I have used the ratios and not the dollars. Advertised pay splits: Pointer Strategy, go-to-market salary benchmarks for Australia and New Zealand, built from job advertisements collected from 30 March 2026, which reports a median advertised base-to-variable split of 60 to 40 for account executive roles, a middle half between 55 and 70 percent base, drawn from the 452 advertisements that stated both figures, and about 10 percent of 26,246 advertisements mentioning uncapped commission. That sample skews towards companies willing to publish a split and its city breakdown covers Australian cities only, so read it as Australia and New Zealand rather than as New Zealand alone. New Zealand base pay: SEEK New Zealand, "Highest paid sales jobs in New Zealand", updated 27 January 2026, giving average advertised salaries of NZ$90,000 for an account manager and NZ$105,000 for a business development manager. SEEK's own note on that page about the period covered and the salary threshold is ambiguous, so treat those two as indicative averages of advertised base pay rather than a precise benchmark. The worked example is arithmetic rather than research and the rates are illustrative, so substitute your own: NZ$70,000 base plus NZ$50,000 variable is NZ$120,000 on target; at a quota multiple of four that is NZ$480,000 of new revenue; at a 70 percent gross margin that is NZ$336,000 of gross profit against NZ$120,000 of pay; NZ$480,000 at an average first-year contract of NZ$25,000 is 19.2 customers, and at NZ$120,000 is 4 customers. No published survey measures how many New Zealand first sales comp plans get rewritten within six months, so there is no figure here for it. The ramp shape, the rule against paying commission on renewals the founder closed, and the three clauses to settle in writing come from my own work with New Zealand B2B tech companies rather than from published data.

Nick Burns is a fractional CRO for New Zealand B2B tech companies, at home and expanding internationally. He co-founded Emendo and sold it to McKesson, then the 14th-largest company on the Fortune 500, and has since helped 60+ tech companies grow sales.