Sales ecosystem health checklist 

Sales compensation plans rarely fail all at once. They drift: a quota mechanic added here, a title created there, until the plan quietly starts working against the strategy it was built to support.

This checklist gives Sales, HR, Sales Ops, and Finance leaders a structured way to spot that drift early, across strategy alignment, role design, quota setting, plan mechanics, governance, and market competitiveness.

Work through each section. Check any statement that's true for your organization today.A scoring guide at the end will help you interpret the results.

☐ Your sales comp plan hasn't been reassessed since your last major shift in growth strategy (new segment, motion, product line, or M&A).

☐ Different sales motions (new logo, expansion, renewal) are paid on the same plan design.

☐ Sales leadership and Finance disagree on what behavior the comp plan is actually incentivizing.

☐ Reps can hit 100%+ of target while missing the company's real strategic priorities (e.g., target accounts, new products, strategic segments).

☐ There's no clear “line of sight” from corporate growth goals to what each sales role is actually paid to do.

☐ The number of roles compensated on a single deal has grown organically (SEs, managers, specialists, partners), and no one can point to a coverage model decision that set it there.

☐ Multi touch or long cycle deals (large RFPs, multi-year contracts) don't have documented split credit rules, so the people who do the early-stage prospecting quietly get paid less for it.

☐ Territory or account assignments haven't been rebalanced in over 12 months despite market or headcount changes.

☐ You have more sales job titles than you have distinct, well defined comp plan designs.

☐ Overlay/specialist roles (SEs, CSMs, partner reps) are paid on metrics that conflict with the core rep's incentives.

☐ New hires and tenured reps sit on materially different quota/comp structures with no documented transition logic.

☐ Multiple roles legitimately share credit on the same deal, but no one can point to real influence behind who gets paid, so some participants are quietly collecting credit for work they didn't do.

☐ Quotas are set top down from the revenue target and reverse engineered, rather than built up from territory/account potential.

☐ You don't know your average new rep time to productivity, or it's trending the wrong way.

☐ Either a meaningful share of reps miss threshold every year, or a meaningful share clear 150 to 200% of target every year, and neither pattern has prompted anyone to revisit how the goals are set.

☐ Ramp/guarantee periods for new hires aren't tied to actual ramp data. They're “what we've always done.”

☐ Capacity planning and quota setting happen in different meetings, run by different people, without a shared model.

☐ Quotas have quietly been set low enough that reps clear accelerator pay without much of a stretch, and no one can say whether that was a deliberate call or years of drift.

☐ When you plot attainment across the sales force, it doesn't form one normal curve. It's lumpy or splits into two separate peaks, which usually means quotas aren't built the same way for everyone in the role.

☐ Your payout curve has more than one inflection point (kicker, accelerator, cap), and no one, including the person who owns the plan, can explain from memory why any of them are set where they are.

☐ Reps can tell you their OTE split (base/variable) but not what behaviors actually drive the variable portion.

☐ Mechanisms exist that reward technical/administrative wins (e.g., paperwork timing) nearly as much as they reward selling.

☐ The plan has more than 4 to 5 metrics/components, and reps still can't tell you, unprompted, what they're paid on.

☐ Windfall or revenue that isn't sales driven (automatic renewals, price increases, volume driven by M&A) pays out the same as net new sales effort.

☐ The same base to variable pay mix is applied to every seller regardless of how much control that role actually has over the outcome, a strategic account manager and a standard renewal rep on the identical ratio.

☐ A KSO, MBO, or similar discretionary component gets cleared by nearly everyone almost every period, which means it isn't actually separating strong performers from weak ones.

☐ Add on bonuses for multi-year deals, early renewals, or similar extras can be worth as much as a rep's base commission rate, so payout ends up depending more on deal structure than on selling skill.

☐ There's no formal plan document review/sign off process. The plan “just changes” mid-year when something breaks.

☐ Comp disputes take more than a few days to resolve, or resolution depends on who you know rather than a documented process.

☐ Plan changes in the last two years were driven more by individual rep complaints than by data.

☐ There's no single source of truth for what each rep is actually paid on today, across regions/business units.

☐ Calculating what one rep is owed on one deal means cross referencing several separate rate tables (deal source, term length, tier, and so on) instead of one clear formula.

☐ At least one role's written job description reads as support or administrative work, but the person in it sits on a full, quota carrying commission plan with open ended upside.

☐ The same job title comes with a different pay mix, quota method, or plan mechanic depending on which region, business unit, or manager a rep reports to, and nobody can explain why.

☐ You haven't benchmarked pay levels, mix, or leverage against the market in the past 18 to 24 months.

☐ You can't quickly answer: “What's our cost of sale as a % of revenue, and is it moving in the right direction?”

☐ Voluntary turnover among top performers is a bigger problem than turnover among low performers, or you genuinely don't know which it is.

☐ There's no regular (at least annual) review that ties plan performance back to business outcomes, not just payout totals.

☐ A plan that has swung between very high and very low payouts year to year is treated as a market pay question, not as the retention risk sitting inside the numbers.

If your organization checked several boxes in more than one category, the underlying issue usually isn't a single metric or mechanic. It's a misalignment between how the sales comp plan was designed and how the business actually sells today.

Marsh's Sales Compensation and Effectiveness practice helps organizations diagnose and rebuild sales compensation plans. Grounded in our broader Sales Ecosystem framework spanning Growth Strategy, Operating Architecture, Capacity Optimization, and Compensation Strategy, the rebuilt plan drives the behavior the business actually needs. Let’s talk about what your results mean for your organization.