Can We Fix the End-of-Quarter ARR Rush? What Compensation Experiments Taught Us

If you’ve worked in SaaS sales long enough, you’ve seen the pattern:

A huge portion of ARR closes in the last month of the quarter.
Often, an even more shocking share lands in the final two weeks.

In some quarters, I’ve watched 30–40% of bookings come in the last 10 business days.

At first glance, this feels like a harmless rhythm of business.

But anyone in Sales Ops, Finance, Legal, or Deal Desk knows the reality:

Quarter-end compression isn’t just stressful — it’s expensive.

Contracts pile up for legal review

Discounting spikes

Forecasts become unstable

Operations teams burn out

And rushed deals can mean value left on the table

So naturally, the question comes up:

Is this inevitable? Or is it something we’ve created through incentives?

The Core Question: Customer-Driven or Incentive-Driven?

End-of-quarter deal clustering is often explained as “just how buyers behave.”

And yes — procurement cycles, budgeting timelines, and board approvals matter.

But sellers also operate inside a system full of artificial deadlines:

Quarterly quota cliffs

Accelerator thresholds

QBR pressure

“Must-close-this-quarter” executive scrutiny

The calendar becomes a forcing function.

Which raises a deeper question:

If we changed incentives, could we change the timing of revenue?

A Simple Experiment: Pay More for Earlier Deals

In a previous role, we tested a straightforward comp experiment:

Close in Month 1 → +2% commission bonus

Close in Month 2 → +1% commission bonus

Close in Month 3 → No bonus (standard plan)

The goal was simple:

Pull deals forward. Smooth out the quarter. Reduce the crunch.

And technically… it worked.

But not in the way we expected.

What Happened: Incentives Worked — Selectively

One seller had a very large deal in flight.

For that deal, an extra 2% commission wasn’t a small nudge.

It represented real money.

So the seller did what incentives are designed to do:

They moved mountains to accelerate the customer timeline.

Pulled stakeholders together

Escalated internally

Negotiated harder

Created urgency

The deal closed in Month 1.

The needle moved.

But then we looked at the rest of the distribution.

Smaller deals?

Almost no change.

For those opportunities, the bonus simply wasn’t enough to justify:

Fighting procurement delays

Applying pressure to customers

Spending political capital

Pulling deals forward at all costs

The incentive was meaningful at the top… and irrelevant in the middle.

The Bigger Lesson: Compensation Is Not Linear

This is one of the most underappreciated truths in sales compensation:

The same incentive can produce wildly different behaviors depending on deal size.

A 2% bonus is:

Life-changing on a $1M deal

Barely noticeable on a $20K deal

So comp experiments often don’t shift the whole curve.

They shift the extremes.

The Risk of Perverse Incentives

There was another concern too:

If sellers know Month 1 always pays more, what stops them from delaying deals?

A predictable pacing bonus could create gaming behavior:

Deals pushed out of Month 3

Deals artificially timed into the next quarter

Sellers optimizing commission, not revenue

And in practice, quarterly quota pressure often dominates…

…but comp plans always create second-order effects.

Which leads to an uncomfortable conclusion:

There is no “perfect” incentive. Only trade-offs.

The EasyComp Perspective: Comp Should Be Experimental

The biggest takeaway from this experience wasn’t that pacing bonuses are bad.

It was something deeper:

Compensation design should be treated like experimentation, not doctrine.

Too often, companies make comp decisions based on intuition:

“This should motivate sellers.”

“This should smooth revenue.”

“This should reduce discounting.”

And then they never validate the outcome.

At EasyComp, we believe the future of commissions management looks different:

Run controlled compensation experiments

Measure behavioral impact

Look at distribution shifts, not anecdotes

Accept when something didn’t work

Learn, iterate, and improve

Because comp is one of the most powerful levers a business has…

…and one of the least scientifically managed.

The Real Question Going Forward

End-of-quarter compression may never disappear completely.

Customers have their own calendars.

But incentives shape seller behavior more than most organizations admit.

The question isn’t:

Can we eliminate the quarter-end rush?

It’s:

Can we design systems that are honest, measurable, and adaptive — rather than chaotic and reactive?

That’s the kind of compensation management we’re building toward at EasyComp.

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