How to Structure a Sales Incentive Plan for Consulting Firms

Here's a sales incentive plan example from Mark Orttung, our CEO, who ran it at Nexient, a US software services firm that grew past $130M and was bought by NTT Data. It's the plan behind our calculator, built for firms up to about $30M whose client partners report to the CEO.

What makes a consulting sales incentive plan different?

Because the same person wins a client and then grows it, a consulting plan pays them a share of their clients' revenue, and moves that share up or down depending on how much those clients grew and how profitable they were. Most of a firm's new work comes from clients it already has. In Projectworks research for How To Win More Work, three in five firms said more than half of their proposals go to clients they already have.

Sales leaders want that growth, but their pay plans often don't reward it. In a Gartner survey published in 2025, 73% of 243 sales leaders said growth from existing customers was a priority for the year. A year earlier, CaptivateIQ, which sells commission software, found that most of the 200 large US B2B companies it surveyed still paid mainly on new business.

Our podcast on sales compensation for consulting firms covers who should do this job. We also have a useful calculator that you can check out for free, which explains why the plan gives growth and margin equal weight:

Step 1: Set your growth and account margin targets

Use the growth and margin targets your firm already has, or this year's actual numbers if you have none.

Start from what your firm can afford. At Nexient, Mark set aside about 4% of revenue for selling and looking after clients, with marketing paid for separately, and the client partners' pay had to fit inside that. He described both targets when he first outlined the plan on our podcast. "We paid them a percentage of the revenue they sold and managed… target was 25% growth per account and 37.5% account margin." The margin target, set on each account's gross margin, began at 35% and rose to 37.5% as the firm added more value.

Our calculator uses a broader account margin that also takes off the client partner's own pay, so the same client shows a lower margin there than in these bands or our account margin calculator. Set your target on the basis you'll measure.

Step 2: Pay on both, with sliding bands

This consulting sales commission structure comes down to one line of arithmetic.

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Work it out per account, then add the results.

• Each factor is 1.0 when an account hits its target, so a client partner on target for both earns 2% of the revenue they manage.
• Each factor rises to 1.2 at the top band and falls to 0.25 at the bottom, which sets a maximum of 2.4% and a floor of 0.5%.
• The 2.4% limits the percentage, not the pay, because more client revenue still means more money.

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That simplicity is deliberate. In QuotaPath's 2024 survey of more than 450 SaaS revenue leaders, 78% said their reps find their pay plans hard to understand, and Mark's view is that once a plan is this simple, it's up to the firm to spell out exactly what it wants. Pay also steps down gradually between the bands, rather than dropping to the minimum when someone misses a target. As Mark put it, "You set a goal, somebody gets 90% of it or 80% of it, you don't want to just sort of fail them out and say, well, sorry, you get nothing for that."

Step 3: Decide how new clients count

You can only measure growth against last year's revenue, and a brand new client has none, so give each new client a set growth factor for its first year. Nexient used the top factor, 1.2, for the first 12 months, plus a margin factor of 1.0 for the first two quarters as long as margin stayed at 25% or more. Starting new clients at 1.0 instead pays them as if they'd hit the growth target, a gentler push toward new logos.

Plan rules for payment, handovers and clawbacks

When to pay, and on what

Paying every six months, then settling up at the end of the year once the full-year numbers are in, keeps the money coming regularly without paying out on figures that may still change. Compare each half with the same half a year earlier, so seasonal swings don't distort growth. The bigger decision is what to pay on. Commission on cash collected follows when a client pays its bills rather than when the work gets done, and commission on signed deals pays for work that may never happen. Paying on revenue as the firm earns it (revenue recognized) avoids both problems.

Handovers, commission clawbacks and leavers

When an account moves between client partners, split the credit for six months so neither has a reason to fight the handover. Leave out revenue on invoices 90 or more days overdue, and claw back commission on revenue that's later written off. Anyone who leaves is paid pro rata for the period they worked. These are example rules for a sales incentive plan, so adapt them to your firm.

How big does the book need to be?

At a 2% on-target payout, the client revenue each client partner needs to look after (their book) depends on their on-target earnings (OTE) and how much of that is variable pay rather than salary. Divide the variable pay by 2% and you have the book. A $200K OTE split 60/40 includes $80K of variable pay, which takes a $4M book.

Gartner's 2019 advice is that each thing a plan measures should make up at least 15% of OTE. Our calculation in the share-of-OTE column shows a 70/30 split only just gets there.

There are two reasons to offer uncapped commission. A cap on a 70/30 plan tells the client partner when to stop, since once the 30% is earned there's nothing left to sell for. An uncapped plan also changes who applies for the job. In Mark's experience, strong candidates look at it and picture a very large payout, while less aggressive ones ask what's guaranteed and rule themselves out. The sales incentive plan calculator covers setting OTE and the split, plus the full argument against caps.

Because we didn't cap it, they could earn as much as they wanted, and from our perspective, the more they earned, the better.

What if you also have a dedicated door opener?

Some firms hire a separate door opener just to find new clients. A simpler plan suits that role. Nexient paid its door openers a share of each new client's revenue that stepped down from 2% in year one to 1% in year two and stopped in year three. Winning a new division of a large existing client can restart the clock. Contractors in the role tend to want paying on contract size rather than on the work delivered. The calculator doesn't cover this, since it assumes one person both wins and grows clients.

Start from these numbers, then make them yours

Copy the example inputs, then change them until they describe how your firm wins and grows clients. The harder part is running the plan. Every six months you need each client's revenue, growth and margin, from numbers the client partner trusts, because their pay depends on them. Customers have invoiced $3B through Projectworks, which keeps invoices and the cost of doing the work in one system. Put your own numbers through the sales incentive formula before you write the plan.

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