# Your Comp Plan Teaches Sandbagging

Reps hold deals when payout rules punish honest timing and reward quarter-end theater. Your compensation plan writes the behavior your forecast keeps blaming on sellers.

Published: 2026-09-06

Page: https://www.revenue-reimagined.com/insights/newsletter/your-comp-plan-teaches-sandbagging-v2

![GTM Uncensored](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/c2f89e79-5eb2-4f34-8f3f-5c31504b6887/logo-stacked-white.png?t=1788530824)**FIELD NOTES FOR FOUNDERS AND REVENUE LEADERS**

![A hand moves a buyer-ready deal from this quarter across a red deadline into next quarter toward a larger commission payout.](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/8b807af6-440d-479b-9dc7-5d50781de97f/gtmu-hero-v2.jpg?t=1788530770)### Your reps do not need a secret agreement to sandbag. They only need a payout table that makes honesty expensive.

## THE SHORT VERSION

- ### Claim: A lot of sandbagging is a rational response to plan design, not a rep-discipline problem.
- **Test:** If moving a buyer-ready deal by seven days changes the rep's economics more than it changes the buyer outcome, the plan is paying for timing.
- **Decision:** Replay the last two quarters through the proposed plan before approving it. Fix the rules that reward hidden risk.

**READ TIME**
4.5 MINUTES

**REPLY**
What deal would your plan pay a rep to hold until Monday?

Put one buyer-ready deal on the whiteboard. The customer can sign Friday or Monday. The scope, price, probability, and implementation date do not change. Only the quarter changes.

Now calculate the rep's payout both ways. If Monday pays more, protects an accelerator, escapes a cap, or gives the rep a cleaner start against the next target, leadership has created an auction for the close date. The CRM will lose that auction.

Most companies attack this with stricter inspections and louder forecast calls. That treats the record after the incentive has already shaped the behavior. Start where the behavior was priced: the compensation plan.

## HOW THE PLAN TRAINS DELAY

Comp plans do not describe the behavior a company wants. They price the behavior a company will get. Four design choices create most of the damage:

- **Hard accelerator cliffs.** One dollar below the threshold earns the ordinary rate. One dollar above it changes the value of the next deal. A rep near the line stops asking, “When can the buyer sign?” and starts asking, “Where is this deal worth more to me?”
- **Quarter resets without continuity.** A deal that cannot push the rep through a current-quarter gate may be more useful as the first deal in the next quarter. The buyer sees the same outcome. The rep sees different economic value.
- **Caps and decelerators.** Once extra production pays less, or pays nothing, the plan tells the best reps to save inventory. Calling that sandbagging does not change the instruction.
- **Punishment for early bad news.** Forecast misses have a financial cost. Public interrogation adds a career cost. When a surprise win earns praise, and an early risk call earns pain, the manager has created a second compensation system.

No rep needs to manipulate every deal. A few rational date moves near quarter-end are enough to corrupt coverage, hiring, cash planning, and the board forecast. The plan can hit its payout budget while the operating system loses the truth.

## RUN THE PAYOUT MATH

**Use an illustrative deal before you debate intent.** A rep is at 88% of quota. The next accelerator begins at 100%. An 8-point deal can close on Friday or Monday.

- ### Close Friday: the rep finishes at 96%, receives the ordinary rate, and begins the next quarter at zero.
- ### Close Monday: the rep receives the same ordinary rate and begins the next quarter at 8%.

The company wants Friday. The plan gives the rep no extra money for Friday and more future optionality for Monday. The rep does not have to be dishonest to see the trade.

Run a second case for a rep already above a cap or inside a decelerator. If Friday produces little or no incremental commission while Monday restores the full rate, the plan has put a price on delay. That price will beat a manager's speech about urgency.

Use one line in the review:

### Timing incentive = payout on the later date − payout on the earlier date + the value of next-quarter attainment.

A directional model is enough to show where the number becomes positive. That is where the company starts bidding against its own close date.

If a seven-day date change improves rep economics without changing the buyer outcome, the plan is buying sandbagging.

## AUDIT THE LAST 30 DAYS

Do not launch a culture campaign. Pull every opportunity whose close date changed during the final 30 days of the last two quarters. Add these fields:

1. Original close date, final close date, and the date the risk first became visible.
2. Rep attainment and the active commission rate on both dates.
3. Payout on the original date, seven days earlier, and seven days later.
4. The CRM reason for the move and the buyer event that supports it.
5. The manager, forecast category, and first meeting where the risk was discussed.

Then sort the deals two ways: by compensation rule and by manager.

A cluster around the same accelerator, cap, or reset points to plan design. A cluster under one manager, especially when risk appeared before it entered the forecast, points to inspection behavior. Both can be true. The useful question is not “Who sandbagged?” It is “What did our system make rational?”

Treat buyer-controlled delays separately. Legal review, procurement, security, budget release, and executive approval can move a deal without any seller incentive. The audit exists to separate those events from date changes the company paid to create.

## REWRITE THE RULES

Bring the CRO, CFO, and RevOps leader into one working session. Do not start with next year's desired cost of sales. Start with the last two quarters of actual deals and price the behavior each proposed rule would have purchased.

- **Replace cliffs with graduated economics.** A narrow attainment change should not create a large swing in the value of the next buyer-ready deal.
- **Remove caps that make production worthless.** If finance needs protection, solve the risk in quota setting, credit rules, or deal review instead of telling the best rep to stop.
- **Require evidence for late date changes.** Every move inside the final 30 days gets a reason, a buyer-controlled event, and a manager review. “Customer pushed” is not evidence.
- **Score forecast calibration, not surprise revenue.** Reward managers whose calls become more accurate as the quarter progresses. Stop celebrating sandbagged upside as heroic execution.
- **Replay the plan before approval.** Model the prior two quarters under the new rules. Flag every deal where a seven-day shift changes payout tier, quota credit, or marginal rate.

The standard is simple: the same buyer outcome inside a narrow date window should carry roughly the same rep economics. When that is impossible, make the exception visible and deliberate.

A compensation plan still requires judgment. It should not pay people to hide that judgment from the operating system.

## MONDAY MORNING MOVE

Output metrics show the result. Buyer behavior shows what to change next.

1. **ACTION:** Pull 90 days of heat-map or session-recording data from the highest-spend landing page. Move the most-used element besides the primary CTA into a standalone section higher on the page. Leave the headline, CTA, and surrounding layout alone.
2. **OWNER:** The demand generation leader owns the page change. RevOps verifies scroll-depth and demo-request tracking before launch.
3. **DEADLINE:** Launch by Friday, run the test for 14 days, then review scroll depth and demo requests. A flat result moves the investigation upstream from page copy.

## ON THE AIR

[![Tas Bober on GTM Uncensored discussing conversion rate and buyer behavior](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/cdde86e8-e7f5-4f3b-b14c-3ff8dc9e1d36/maxresdefault.jpg?t=1788457595)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwF4JpL6WPU&utm_source=www.newsletter.gtmuncensored.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=your-comp-plan-teaches-sandbagging)### The Metric That’s Killing Your Pipeline

Tas Bober, founder of The Scroll Lab, joins Adam Jay and Dale Zwizinski to explain why conversion rate records an outcome without explaining buyer behavior. Drawing from work across more than 50 companies, she shows how page consumption, form friction, and pipeline quality change the next revenue decision.

- ### What changed: One Snagit page pulled a high-interest license answer out of the fourth FAQ, and purchases rose 265%.
- ### What broke: Weekly conversion reporting forced decisions against sales cycles lasting roughly 90 days.
- ### What to do Monday: Inspect where qualified visitors scroll, click, pause, and leave before changing copy or spend.

[ LISTEN TO THE EPISODE ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwF4JpL6WPU&utm_source=www.newsletter.gtmuncensored.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=your-comp-plan-teaches-sandbagging)**BROUGHT TO YOU BY**

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[ MEET NOOKS ](https://www.nooks.ai/?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=gtm-uncensored&utm_content=newsletter)**SEE THE GAP. FIX THE LEAK.**
*Revenue Reimagined's GTM Gap®* framework gives founders and revenue leaders a practical operating system for alignment, ownership, and durable growth.

[ BOOK A FREE STRATEGY CALL ](https://calendly.com/revenue-reimagined/free-revenue-reimagined-strategy-call?utm_source=www.newsletter.gtmuncensored.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=your-comp-plan-teaches-sandbagging)### No theater. No recycled playbooks.

Adam Jay and Dale Zwizinski