The Broken Comp Plan

Traditional SaaS compensation was built around a single moment: the signature on the contract. A rep closes the deal, earns the commission, and hands the account to a separate customer success function whose job is to keep it renewed. That structure made sense when the product being sold was access (a licence, a seat count) because access is something you can sell once and defend at renewal.

Agentic products don't work that way. They sell through action: value compounds or evaporates based on how the product is actually used, week over week, long after the contract is signed. A comp plan that pays the rep in full at close and then disappears has no mechanism left to influence the thing that now determines whether the deal was actually good for the business.

One well known consumption pricing vendor rebuilt its incentive structure rather than patch it. Commission was split between the initial commitment and the consumption that was actually recognized later, and (more strikingly) the company folded its standalone customer success function into the sales organization entirely, so the people who signed the deal were also the people whose pay depended on whether the customer kept using the product.

That is the part most companies skip. It is straightforward to add a new pricing tier or a usage dashboard. It is much harder to tell a sales organization that their compensation now depends on outcomes they don't fully control on day one. Companies that treat this as a minor adjustment to an existing comp plan will keep watching good products fail to convert into durable revenue, because the people selling them are still optimized for a moment that no longer determines success.