Cracking the Code: Sales Incentives in a Usage-Based World

But what happens to the sales comp plan when there’s no annual contract, no committed usage, and no predictable ramp?

Turns out—quite a bit changes.

After countless conversations with GTM and RevOps leaders across high-growth SaaS, here are the principles that separate chaotic from scalable in usage-based comp design:

🧠 Step 1: Understand What Drives Usage

Before designing incentives, top-performing companies invest in identifying what truly triggers customer growth. That doesn’t mean the revenue line—it means the behaviors upstream of it.

Ask questions like:

• Does usage spike when analytics features are enabled?
• Can the customer leverage more value when they add multiple departments?
• Is usage driven by launching new workloads?

Build your GTM motion (and comp plans) around helping customers unlock that value. This shifts your sales org from booking revenue to activating usage potential.

👥 Step 2: Rethink Your Team Structure

Not every usage motion needs a quota-carrying AE.

If usage is organic once the customer lands, you may only need onboarding or product success roles.

But if value emerges when multiple teams onboard or new units adopt your product, that’s expansion—and it’s squarely in the AE’s domain.

💡 Tip: Map customer value levers → internal roles. This is more critical than ever in usage-based businesses.

⚖️ Step 3: Consider a Hunter/Farmer Design

In enterprise: AEs often own both landing and expanding, paid on net new ARR or net revenue retention.

In mid-market or PLG motions: a hunter (new logo) → farmer/onboarding handoff can outperform. Here's one model:

• New Logo team: Paid on first 3–6 months of consumption
• Onboarding team: Paid on customer milestones (adoption, expansion, usage triggers)

This drives activation, not just acquisition.

📈 Step 4: Compensate on Consumption—But Carefully

Paying reps on raw monthly usage sounds fair, but it can incentivize passivity once the account starts consuming regularly.

More robust strategies:

• Set a baseline ARR for each account
• Pay only on incremental ARR above baseline
• Recalibrate baselines monthly to smooth seasonality
• Add downside protection to avoid punishing reps for temporary dips

If reps carry few accounts, baselines need to be surgical. If portfolios are large, smoothing across accounts helps balance earnings.

🛠️ Don't Underestimate the Ops Challenge

Most usage data lives in product databases, not your CRM. Tracking ARR, usage triggers, and milestones at the account level is non-trivial—and can crush ops teams if not automated.

This is where most comp plans break down—not in design, but in execution.

💡 Final Thoughts

There’s no silver bullet for usage-based comp, but here’s the framework winning teams rely on:

✅ Align comp to the value drivers, not just outcomes

✅ Incentivize the right team at the right moment

✅ Prioritize incremental value creation

✅ Protect reps from unpredictable usage swings

✅ Evalute systems that keep your operations agile and automated

At EasyComp, we’re building tooling specifically for this new world—from usage-based crediting to account-level ARR tracking, milestone rewards, and data integrations across product and CRM systems.

📬 Curious how we’d approach it for your GTM motion? Let’s talk: [email protected]

‍