When a rep moves from the mindset of “I hit my number” to “earning double on everything from here,” how they treat every deal is going to change. Flat commission structures just don’t create that same level of drive and motivation that you get with accelerators.
Most businesses have a hard time with accelerators, though. Set the threshold too low and half of your sales team is going to hit their accelerators – your compensation budget grows way out of control, and you’ll be forced to make some tough quota adjustments the following year. Set it too high and your reps will give up before they try – they’ll view accelerators like lottery tickets that only a few lucky reps ever get when they land one really big account. Forrester research found that top performers usually earn between 1.5x and 2x their standard commission rate once they cross 120% attainment – but this only works when businesses design these thresholds to actually reward genuine overachievement instead of quota sandbagging or timing.
Around 80% of compensation plans use accelerators, and businesses that mismanage these multipliers wind up paying for it in a few ways. Budget overruns add up when too many reps hit their accelerators at the same time, and retention becomes a big problem when your top performers start to see that their earnings actually have a ceiling. The worst part is the backward incentives that this creates – reps start holding deals back across quarters instead of just closing them when they should!
Here’s how accelerators can improve your sales team’s earnings and motivation!
How Sales Accelerators Help Your Business
Accelerators work as reward multipliers that activate when you hit a particular sales target. To give you a better sense of how this works, think of it as a bonus level in a video game – it only unlocks after you’ve reached a certain milestone. Your commission rate is going to stay the same until you cross that threshold with your sales numbers. When you pass it, the rate jumps to a higher percentage, and the new rate applies to everything you sell past that point.
Numbers always help explain how this actually works. Say your base commission rate sits at 10% and you have an accelerator that kicks in when you hit $100,000 in sales. Everything you sell before that first $100,000 earns you the base rate and means you’d make $10,000 in commission. When you cross that threshold, your rate bumps to 15% on everything you sell after that. Close another $50,000 in sales, and you’ll earn $7,500 on that portion instead of the $5,000 you would have made at your base rate – it’s an extra $2,500 directly in your pocket just from hitting the accelerator.
This helps you attract the right type of salespeople – the ones who know they can perform well and want to be paid accordingly. Top performers are always on the lookout for comp plans that include accelerators and for an obvious reason – the extra commission can pile up fast and give businesses a clean way to reward their highest achievers without needing to bump up the base salaries for the entire team.
The commission structure does something interesting for you – it filters your sales team automatically. Reps who want to earn bigger commissions and push their numbers are going to be attracted to positions that have strong accelerators. And reps who like to know what they’re going to make each month will probably look for opportunities somewhere else. This way, you’ll build a team that’s full of competitive reps who want to blow past their goals instead of just barely hitting the quota.
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How Companies Calculate Commission Thresholds
The percentage you pick matters in how your entire team responds to it. A rep who sees 110% as their target is going to approach the month quite a bit differently than a rep who’s shooting for 108%. Round numbers just make more sense as commission thresholds – reps remember them more easily, and the math stays simple when they’re in the middle of a deal, and everyone has a much cleaner goal to work toward. When your sales team knows they need to reach 110% before they earn at a higher commission rate, each person can do quick mental math to tell them where they stand without needing to pull anything up or grab a calculator.
Those commission thresholds come from financial calculations. Finance teams have to look at each deal and work out how much margin will be left over once it closes. Once they have that number, they can work backward from their profitability targets to see how much extra commission they can realistically afford to pay out. All businesses have a limit here, and if the accelerated commissions go too far, they’ll start to cut into profit margins more than the company can sustain.
That breaking point is what decides how aggressive or conservative you should be with your accelerator structure. A company that has healthy profit margins can afford to set the threshold at 100% and give pretty generous acceleration rates to its sales team. Another business that operates on much tighter margins might need to push that threshold up to 120% and put a cap on the acceleration at a lower rate.
The goal is to reward your top performers and make sure that each extra sale doesn’t cost more than it should or hurt your bottom line.
Accelerators can vary pretty dramatically from one company to another, and the main driver behind those differences is the financial reality that each business operates within. Every company has to work out what it can afford to pay out in accelerated commissions, and at the same time, it needs to make sure that those rates are high enough that its sales teams stay hungry and motivated to work hard even after they’ve already hit their quota.
The Four Main Types of Accelerators
Most sales teams use one of four main types of commission accelerators. All four are built to move you from your base commission rate to higher percentages. But each one manages the progression a bit differently based on how it’s structured.
Tiered accelerators are probably the most common type you’ll see. These commission structures work with multiple steps, and each step gets activated as soon as you hit a different performance benchmark along the way. Say that you earn 5% on your first $100k in sales. When you cross that threshold, the rate jumps to 7% on everything between $100k and $200k. Push past $200k, and you might move to 9%. Every new tier has its own rate, and the rate only applies to the revenue that falls within that bracket.
Cliff accelerators work on a different structure – they’re based on a single breaking point in your total sales. When you cross that threshold, your commission rate changes retroactively on everything you’ve sold so far in that period. Say you’ve sold $99k at a 5% rate, and then you close just one more deal that brings you to $101k. Your commission rate jumps straight to 8%, and the higher rate gets applied backward to the full $101k you brought in.
Progressive accelerators work a little differently, and they usually feel much smoother in practice. With this type of commission structure, your rate goes up bit by bit as you continue to sell more over time. You might start out at 5%, and then for every $25k worth of sales you bring in, your rate climbs up by 0.5 percentage points. You get a steady momentum effect without any harsh jumps or sudden spikes to worry about. SaaS businesses tend to like this model because it lines up with the way that their subscription revenue builds over time.
Multiplier accelerators use a different formula than the standard strategy. Where a typical accelerator just bumps up your base commission rate, a multiplier takes your total commission and multiplies the entire amount by a percentage. Let’s say that you manage to hit 120% of your quota – your whole commission check gets multiplied by 1.5x. Everything scales up together, and the results can be large.
Big software sales teams usually gravitate toward cliff structures, and it makes sense when you look at how they work. These teams don’t close nearly as many deals. But each one comes with a much bigger price tag. When your sales cycles can take months (or even longer), a single big payout at the end is the better way to go. Consumer products and transactional sales work differently – most businesses in those spaces use tiered or progressive commission models. Reps in those industries are closing deals all of the time, sometimes a few of them in a single day, so incremental payment as they climb through different volume thresholds makes more sense for everyone.
Plenty of compensation plans will actually combine different methods into one structure. You could have tiered rates for your base commission, and then a multiplier gets added on when you beat your quota. Businesses usually like this setup because they can reward their reps for different achievements at different points in the sales cycle.
The Upside and the Downside
Accelerators give your top performers a shot at earning far more compared to what they’d normally make in a year. When a rep crosses their quota threshold and lands in the accelerator territory, each deal after that point pays them a higher commission rate. This feels great, and the rest of the team can see what that performance looks like in dollar terms. Everyone wants to hit that same tier. On top of motivating your whole team, accelerators also work as a strong way to hold onto your best salespeople. Your star performers know they won’t find this sort of upside elsewhere, and it’s a big part of why they stay.
Accelerators have their downsides, though. Deal sandbagging is probably the biggest one. Sales reps will hold off on closing deals that are already signed until the next quarter starts, allowing them to rack up their accelerators way faster in that new quarter. The other big problem is when a salesperson makes a very big commission in one quarter and then loses steam for the next few months. After they’ve already deposited that big paycheck, most of them just don’t have the same hunger to stay at that performance level. Financial planning can get pretty tough when a few reps hit their accelerators during the same quarter. Commission costs are going to be hard for the finance teams to forecast with much accuracy because the payout amounts are way higher compared to what they’d normally see with the standard commission rates. Sales and finance departments don’t always get along well, and this situation can make the relationship pretty tense.
Accelerators can be a valuable tool for your entire team. But they don’t work the same way for everyone. Some team members will do very well under this type of incentive structure – they’ll work harder, perform better and deliver exceptional results. Others might behave differently and start to cut corners or make questionable decisions just to hit their numbers. When you roll out accelerators across your organization, you’ll have to know that both outcomes will happen. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of how much each one changes your bottom line.
Set Up Your Accelerator Framework
An accelerator plan needs you to nail down the time frame pretty early on in the setup process. You’ll need to decide if accelerators reset every quarter or if they run for the full year. A lot of companies go back and forth on this question. But the answer depends on how long your sales cycle is. Teams that close deals within a few weeks usually do better with quarterly accelerators because reps get more opportunities throughout the year to bump up their commission checks. Deals that take 6 months or longer to close are a different story, though – annual accelerators make a lot more sense in those situations because they actually match up with the pace of your sales process.
One more consideration on your plate is the cap on accelerated earnings and specifically where to set it so your top performers don’t feel penalized for their success. What you want is a ceiling that actually works – one that protects your company’s budget and doesn’t make your best reps feel like they hit a wall. The best strategy is a number that your top performer can hit once or twice throughout the year, maybe during the peak sales periods, and it shouldn’t be a threshold that they reach every month like clockwork. When the cap sits too far out of reach, it turns into something meaningless! All it does at that point is frustrate the reps who are trying the hardest to get there.
New hires are going to need a different strategy as they’re ramping up. Accelerators just don’t make much sense for a rep who’s still learning the ins and outs of your product and trying to build their pipeline from the ground up. These reps need a little bit of breathing room to get their footing first. Most teams wait until a rep hits their full quota at least once before any accelerator can kick in for them. This helps you sidestep the weird scenario where a rep closes one lucky deal in their first month and suddenly starts earning accelerated commission rates before they’ve shown any consistent performance.
After the first year ends, it’s time to review your accelerator structure. Money will be moving through the plan by then, and you’ll have plenty to dig into about what’s working and what needs adjustment. Maybe your cap was set too low, and everyone maxed it out by October. Or maybe the threshold was too high, and nobody qualified for it at all. This type of learning only comes from running the plan in practice, and you’ll need to make adjustments when you see how everything actually shakes out. Your first version won’t be perfect, and it doesn’t have to be – as long as you’re willing to adjust and improve it based on what you learn along the way.
Level Up Your Incentives and Rewards
Sales roles are changing – businesses want their reps to act more like consultants than order-takers, and with this new data available, they can finally track what actually works. The accelerator structures are going to continue changing right along with everything else. Deals take months to close, relationships are everything, and the work calls for a different set of skills than it used to. Comp plans need to match up with the way that sales actually works. Those specifics will change over time as the industry changes. But one truth doesn’t change – when a rep performs at a high level, they should get rewarded at an even higher level. That idea isn’t going anywhere because it creates the right incentives for everyone, and each side wins when it’s set up correctly.
Level 6 builds incentive programs that actually move the needle on performance. We should probably talk if you want to see some measurable results. Every company runs a little differently, and those cookie-cutter programs almost never deliver the ROI that you’re looking for.
Claudine is the Chief Relationship Officer at Level 6. She holds a master’s degree in industrial/organizational psychology. Her experience includes working as a certified conflict mediator for the United States Postal Service, a human performance analyst for Accenture, an Academic Dean, and a College Director. She is currently an adjunct Professor of Psychology at Southern New Hampshire University. With over 20 years of experience, she joined Level 6 to guide clients seeking effective ways to change behavior and, ultimately, their bottom line.
