Sunday, October 04, 2026
Big brands never approve a campaign on gut feel alone. Here is the cheap, 48-hour pretest SME owners can run on any piece of marketing before a single dollar goes to media.
Your top salesperson closed the most deals last month. Check the margin on those deals before you hand out the bonus. Most SME commission plans pay for volume, not value — which means the rep chasing the biggest number is often the one quietly eroding your profit. Fix the plan, and the same sales team starts closing better business without you hiring a single new person.
Somewhere in your business there's a commission structure nobody has looked at since you were doing half the revenue you're doing now. It was set up fast, probably copied from a template or borrowed from your first salesperson's contract, and it has one design flaw baked in: it pays the same bonus whether the deal makes you 8% margin or 38%.
Here's what that looks like on the floor. A rep is chasing month-end. They've got a prospect who'll sign today if the price comes down 15%. The rep does the maths in their head — smaller deal at full commission beats no deal at all — and knocks the price down. You get a sale. You lose the margin. The rep hits target. The business gets busier for less money.
Multiply that by every deal closed under pressure, every quarter, for years, and you start to see why revenue can climb while profit stands still. The plan isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed — you just never designed it to protect margin, fit, or the customers actually worth keeping.
The fix isn't ripping up your comp plan and starting a war with your sales team. It's running what Kevin calls the Right-Deal Test — a simple audit that realigns commission with what actually grows the business, not just what closes fastest.
1. Pull the last 20 deals and rank by margin, not revenue.
2. Weight commission by margin and fit, not just dollar value.
3. Build in a margin floor below which commission is reduced or zero.
4. Reward what happens after the sale — renewals, repeat orders.
"Kevin is an absolute powerhouse! He doubled our business's profits in the first month alone with lots more of his recommendations still to be rolled out."
— Curtis Hacon, Give A Sh!t
Most owners Kevin works with already sense this. They've watched a rep discount a deal into the ground and felt the wince. So why does the plan stay untouched for years?
Three reasons, and none of them are good ones. First, fear — changing commission feels like picking a fight with the people paying your mortgage, so owners avoid the conversation rather than risk morale. Second, inertia — "it's always been this way" is doing a lot of work in businesses that have quietly outgrown their original pay structure. Third, most owners don't have anyone checking their blind spots — they're too close to their own sales team to see the pattern from outside.
That's the actual gap. Not knowledge — most owners could sketch the problem on a napkin in five minutes. It's the accountability to redesign the plan properly, communicate it well, and hold the line once a good rep pushes back. That's the part that needs someone outside the business asking the awkward questions until the new structure sticks.
If your sales team is hitting target while your margin quietly slides, the problem probably isn't your salespeople — it's the plan you're paying them against.
Fix the plan, and you become the owner whose best salespeople are paid for the deals that actually grow the business.