When you pay salespeople to do X, they will do X. If X is not precisely what you need, and it rarely is, you will breed cobras.

Here's the thing nobody wants to say: most comp plans are not designed to drive behaviour. They are designed to look like they drive behaviour while quietly creating the exact opposite.

This is the Cobra Effect applied to revenue teams. In colonial India, the British government offered a bounty for dead cobras. Enterprising locals began breeding cobras for profit. The government cancelled the program. The breeders released their now-worthless snakes. The cobra population exploded.

When you pay salespeople to do X, they will do X. If X is not precisely what you actually need, you will breed cobras.

The core problem is that comp plans are written as financial instruments when they are actually communication tools. Every comp plan sends a message to every rep, every day: this is what matters here.

The five failure modes:

1. Measurement overload. More than three measures and reps focus on whichever is easiest to hit. If a measure accounts for less than 20% of variable pay, it effectively doesn't exist.

2. The cliff problem. Plans that pay nothing below 50-60% of quota create a brutal binary. Reps tracking below the cliff in Q3 stop working and start sandbagging deals into Q1.

3. Uncapped accelerators without guardrails. HBR research shows accelerators can increase sales 17% when structured well. Without guardrails, they reward luck as much as skill.

4. Paying on the wrong indicator. Paying on ACV booked with nothing on retention means the rep who closes a deal that churns in month seven still gets paid in full.

5. Plan complexity as a trust problem. When reps can't explain their comp plan, they don't trust it. And when they don't trust it, they ignore it. In 2022, Bravado surveyed hundreds of SaaS sales professionals and found that 54% of reps missed their annual quota.

Case 1: The Discounting Death Spiral. A mid-market SaaS company paying purely on ACV closed discovers win rates are high but deal sizes are declining and NRR is below 100%. Reps discount aggressively because the plan rewards bookings, not quality. Fix: deal quality modifier, full commission within discount threshold, reduced above it, plus a 6-month clawback on churn. Deal sizes recovered, NRR climbed back above 110% within two quarters.

Case 2: The Sandbagging Quarter. A B2B software company finds Q1 is always their biggest quarter - not seasonality, but reps holding Q4 deals into January. Why? Already blown past annual quota, accelerators capped at 200% OTE, deals closed early count against next year. Fix: rolling quarterly model, decouple quota-setting from prior year attainment. Q4 deal closures increased 40% the following year.

Case 3: The Multi-Threading Problem. A company selling to enterprise buying committees pays AEs on a single quota with nothing rewarding the slow work of building executive sponsors. Fix: champion-building activity metric as a non-financial KPI in QBRs, quarterly bonus tied to pipeline health score. Upstream behaviours finally rewarded. This can help you retain great talent.

People: Reps are not lazy optimisers. They are smart people who respond to incentives rationally. If your top rep is sandbagging, the first question is not what is wrong with them - it is what does our plan tell them to do? Per GTMNow research across 150+ SaaS organisations: RevOps-led comp design generates the highest rep trust. Finance-led generates the lowest.

Platform: Real-time earnings visibility changes behaviour. Tools like CaptivateIQ, QuotaPath, and Spiff exist for exactly this reason. The rep who can see that one more deal puts them into a 1.5x accelerator bracket will push harder for that close.

Process: Start comp design in May/June. Finalise by December. Mid-year comp changes are trust-destroying. And stress-test every measure: what is the most rational way a rep could game this while technically complying? That is where your cobra farm is hiding.

Two things you can do in the next five working days:

1. Run the 15-second test. Ask three reps - separately, not in a group - to explain their comp plan in plain English without looking at any documentation. If they struggle, that is your finding. Complexity is not sophistication; it is a trust and behaviour risk. Map back to what two or three measures truly drive your business and simplify ruthlessly.

2. Map your plan against your top three strategic priorities. Write those priorities on one side of a page. Write your comp plan measures on the other. Draw a line connecting each measure to the behaviour it rewards. Every gap you find is a place where your plan is, right now, actively working against your business goals. Pick the most damaging gap and change it for next cycle.

Comp is not the engine of your revenue team. It is the caboose - following where the strategy points. Get the strategy clear, then make the comp plan the most obvious expression of it. When those two things are aligned, the plan disappears into the background. That is exactly what you want.

1. Bravado 2022 State of Sales Compensation Guide: 54% of reps missed annual quota in 2022.

2. Harvard Business Review Motivating Salespeople: What Really Works (Steenburgh and Ahearne, 2012): Multiple accelerators can increase sales by up to 17%.

3. GTMNow How to Build Sales Compensation Plans that Increase Retention and Productivity (2023): Survey of 150+ SaaS organisations on comp plan ownership and trust levels.