A sales compensation plan defines how your sales team gets paid: a fixed base salary, variable pay like commissions and bonuses, and a quota that decides how much of that variable pay a rep actually earns. Base salary plus target variable pay makes up a rep's on-target earnings (OTE).

Sales compensation plans do more than pay people; they shape behavior, drive revenue, and define culture. Get the plan right, and your team is aligned, motivated, and chasing the numbers that actually matter. Get it wrong, and you'll spend every month-end on disputes, recalculations, and reps who no longer trust their payslip.

This guide covers the core components, the main plan types, and a 10-step process to build your own, followed by three sales compensation plan examples. Jump to the examples. Everything here draws on Driven's work with finance, RevOps, and sales compensation leaders who run these plans every single month.

Sales commission software calculates, tracks and explains commissions from your CRM data, so nobody rebuilds a spreadsheet every month. The 9 best tools in 2026:

• Driven: best AI commission agent for HubSpot and Salesforce teams that want to go live in days
• QuotaPath: best for growing teams that want published pricing and broad CRM coverage
• CaptivateIQ: best for mid-market teams with complex, frequently changing plans
• Salesforce Spiff: best for companies that run on Salesforce
• Qobra: best for European RevOps teams that want no-code plans and AI agents
• Xactly Incent: best for large enterprises that also need planning and forecasting
• Performio: best for complex crediting across many data sources and regions
• Sales Cookie: best for small businesses that want month-to-month contracts
• QCommission: best for finance-led teams on QuickBooks or needing on-premise deployment

Choose based on three things: your CRM, how many reps you pay, and how complex your plan is.

TL;DR: Salesforce stores every field commissions depend on, but core Sales Cloud doesn't calculate, explain or protect payouts. Teams close that gap in one of five ways: native formula fields, a custom build, Salesforce's native ICM (Spiff), a vibe-coded tool, or a third-party commission tool. A flat rate and a few reps can stay native. Tiers, accelerators, splits and frequent plan changes point to a dedicated tool, and to an agentic platform like Driven if you want the plan designed, explained and maintained for you.

It's not uncommon for teams in 2026 to still run sales commissions on spreadsheets. The deal data lives in Salesforce, the rates live in a Google Sheet someone built three finance leads ago, and the payouts get reconciled by hand at the end of every quarter. When a rep asks why their number looks different, no one can fully explain it. When finance needs an accrual, someone exports a report and rebuilds it in Excel. The process is time-consuming, error-prone, and actively eroding rep trust. It's hard to keep a sales team motivated when reps can't trust their own paycheck.

Teams that outgrow the spreadsheet usually reach for formula fields, a custom build, or a paid add-on. But tools for managing sales incentives are now moving from rules engines you configure to agents that work alongside you. Gartner predicts that 40% of enterprise applications will feature task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. They also say that 60% of B2B seller work will be executed through conversational interfaces by 2028.

This guide breaks down five ways to track Salesforce commissions, including what each approach does well, where it breaks, and how to choose.

To calculate sales commission, multiply the commissionable sales amount by the commission rate. A $40,000 sale at 8% earns $3,200. Base-plus-commission plans add that figure to salary, and tiered plans apply each tier's rate only to the sales inside it. The hard part is agreeing which deals count and what the rate applies to.

Three core formulas cover almost every plan. Straight commission is Commission = Sales × Rate. Base plus commission is Total pay = Base salary + (Sales × Rate). Tiered commission adds up each tier separately: (Tier 1 sales × Tier 1 rate) + (Tier 2 sales × Tier 2 rate), and so on for every tier the rep reaches.

This guide shows why most payout errors come from deciding which deals count rather than from the calculation itself. It explains why tiered plans can pay very different amounts depending on whether tiers are marginal or retroactive, and it covers why payouts should be locked once approved, so later CRM changes don't alter what has already been paid.

Ask a sales rep what's driving their next paycheck, and you'll often hear all three words used interchangeably: SPIFF, bonus, and commission. They get lumped together as "extra money for selling," but they're not the same thing, and treating them like they are leads to confused reps, inconsistent payouts, and comp plans nobody can actually explain.

A SPIFF is a short-term, targeted incentive. A bonus is a lump-sum reward tied to hitting a broader goal. A commission is the ongoing, formula-based pay tied directly to sales, the core of most sales comp plans, not an add-on to it.

This guide breaks down what each one actually means, when companies use them, how they're calculated, and how they stack together so you can build a comp plan where every payout has a clear reason behind it.

Most commission plans don't fail because the idea is wrong. They fail because nobody modelled the numbers before rolling them out. A rate that looks generous on a slide turns into a payout you can't afford at 130% attainment, or an accelerator so flat that your best reps stop pushing the moment they hit quota.

So we built a free commission sheet template to fix that. It's one Excel file with eight ready-to-use sales commission spreadsheets, each structure on its own tab, each with live formulas and a filled-in sample row. Change a rate, a quota, or a revenue number and every payout updates instantly, and because everything lives in one workbook you can compare models side by side without juggling downloads.

Download the commission sheet template, or start for free and let Driven build the plan for you.

New to comp design? Start with our guide to sales compensation structure types, then model your pick here.