Sales leaders know this pattern well, and they can usually see it take shape long before it becomes a big problem. The same top performers who hit 150% of quota in Q1 and Q2 start to go quiet once Q3 rolls around. Deals that looked ready to close suddenly get pushed to the next quarter, and usually, there’s no legitimate reason for it. Pipeline reports will show opportunities at a 90% probability. But those deals just stay there and don’t move forward for weeks at a time. This behavior is called sandbagging, and it creates problems for teams that need to forecast revenue with any degree of accuracy. This can also damage relationships with customers when reps intentionally delay deals just to manage the timing of their own commission payments.
This mess isn’t caused by lazy or dishonest reps. Most compensation plans drive this behavior, and most leaders don’t realize it. Annual quota resets punish the top performers for their success, and cliff-based bonuses set up incentives that hurt you instead of help you. Studies have found that sandbagging costs businesses between 4% and 6% in lost revenue, and the data shows that somewhere around 30% to 40% of sales teams have big problems with it. This erodes the trust between sales and finance, damages your relationships with customers and builds an environment where gaming the system becomes the norm.
Five simple changes to your compensation structure will stop the sandbagging, and you won’t have to add extra complexity or kill your sales team’s motivation. The best strategy is to remove the incentive for reps to hold deals back – not to build some complex tracking system that tries to find the behavior. When the financial reward for closing deals quickly outweighs any benefit from waiting around, the sandbagging tends to go away on its own.
Here are some strategies to make sure your sales team stays motivated and honest!
Sales Teams Game the Quota System
Most sales compensation plans have a built-in flaw, and it ends up causing all kinds of problems down the line. When a sales rep crushes their Q4 quota and outperforms what was expected of them, something unfortunate tends to happen the following year. Management will usually raise their quota to match those new numbers, or in some cases, they’ll set it even higher. What should be a reward for exceptional performance actually turns into more of a penalty. The rep has made their own job way harder for the next 12 months.
Salespeople figure out this game pretty fast. When a rep closes a massive deal in December and crushes their annual goal, they know what’s about to happen. Next year’s quota is going to be brutal. If they can hold off on that same deal until January, though, they get to start off the new year with instant momentum instead of being up against an impossible target.
Sales reps across the industry run into what’s called the “hero to zero” cycle, and it’s what it sounds like. A rep can finish December at the top of the leaderboard – the person who crushed their goals and stayed late when everyone else went home early. January 1st rolls around, and the numbers get reset to zero. Every rep starts from the same place again, and it doesn’t matter how well they did last month or last quarter. The extra hours from the previous year don’t count toward the new quota period.
The outcome here is fairly predictable. Sales reps will eventually work out how to game the system instead of thinking about selling as much as they can.
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Deals start to get timed intentionally (delayed, accelerated or held back), and it all depends on which compensation period is going to benefit that rep the most. Reps are going to chase whatever incentives you put in front of them. To see different behavior from your entire team, just change the incentive structure – their actions will change right along with it.
Quotas That Never Reset to Zero
An example will make this much easier to follow. A sales rep finishes November at 110% of their rolling quota. When December starts, they don’t get reset back down to 0% like some systems would do. Their performance level stays right at that 110% mark, and they continue to build on top of that number throughout December. When January arrives, it works the same way. And the progress they’ve made carries forward with them into each new period.
Cumulative quarterly goals work on this same principle, and they build on top of one another as the year progresses. The next quarter adds to what you’ve already built up in the previous periods, and nothing ever resets back to zero. This gets rid of much of that artificial pressure that drives sales reps to hold back on closing deals until the next quarter starts.
This model takes extra effort to explain to your entire team – what you get in return is worth it. Those end-of-period games that reps play almost disappear because there’s no reason to hold back on deals anymore. When your progress never gets reset back to zero, sandbagging doesn’t make much sense.
These rolling targets work well on their own – they’re even more effective when you pair them with other changes to your comp plan. This continuous measurement gets rid of the artificial cliffs that make sandbagging seem like the right call.
How Accelerated Commission Rates Work Better
The way it works is pretty simple. Say a rep earns a 10 percent commission rate after they hit their quota for the month. After they reach 110% of that same quota, their commission rate on the sales above that threshold bumps to 15%. Push past 120% and it goes up again to 20%. A tiered structure like this builds a strong incentive for your sales team to close every deal as fast as they can, instead of holding anything back for the following quarter.
This type of deal can make a massive difference in take-home pay. A rep who’s already hit 100% of their quota, with a $50,000 deal sitting in their pipeline, shows how this works. Most businesses go with a flat 10% commission rate, and the deal is worth $5,000 no matter when it closes – this month or next month, the payout doesn’t change. Accelerators change the equation completely. That same $50,000 deal could suddenly be worth $7,500 or $10,000, based on where the rep finishes by the end of the month. Thousands of extra dollars on the table, just for closing deals faster.
Flat commission structures (or even worse, capped earnings) are one of the worst moves for a sales team’s motivation. After your reps reach that specific threshold, the math gets pretty obvious to them – extra work just doesn’t translate to a lot more money in their pocket. Almost like clockwork, right around that same point in the month or quarter, you’ll see that deals suddenly need “just a bit more time” and slide into the next period.
Finance teams usually push back on proposals for an uncapped commission plan, and what they worry about centers on budget predictability. It’s a valid worry. But there’s actually a pretty strong case for the other side. When your sales reps aren’t hitting the artificial caps on their earnings, the deals close faster and more steadily. What this actually means for your business is that revenue comes in at a much steadier, more predictable pace. You also get much better visibility into what’s happening in your pipeline, instead of having to guess which deals are being slow-walked intentionally.
Accelerators also do something pretty clever from a psychological standpoint on your sales floor. As the month gets closer to the end, each deal starts to become more worthwhile. Your reps will start to see their pipeline differently – suddenly, everything feels urgent and worth going after with intensity. What’s even better is how this whole setup actually helps your forecast accuracy at the same time. When reps know they can make more money by closing deals faster, they have way less of a reason to hide opportunities or fudge where things stand.
How Forecast Accuracy Affects Your Performance
Sales reps are always going to focus on the factors that affect their paycheck the most – it’s just how the game works. Link part of their pay to how accurate their forecasts are, and suddenly those sandbagging patterns that would normally stay hidden in the background start to surface.
The mechanics behind all this are pretty simple. Compare what your sales reps are predicting will close against what ends up closing in reality. Take their forecasted close dates and line them up next to the actual close dates to see how far off they were. Do the same with the deal amounts – compare what they expected at the start to the final numbers that came through. After a few months of checking this data on a more regular basis, some patterns will start to emerge that tell you a whole lot about how accurate each rep is.
Set the forecast accuracy at around 10-15% of their variable comp, and your reps are going to care about it. That percentage is big enough that they’ll actually care about making their forecasts right. At the same time, it’s not going to take over their entire commission plan or become their main priority. The bulk of what they earn is still going to come from actually closing deals and hitting their numbers.
Once you start to track this data over time, the patterns of sandbagging get much easier to find. Some reps will close most of their deals in the final few days of each quarter.
A solid dashboard helps managers track these patterns without having to sort through endless spreadsheets. The dashboard should display the forecast versus the actual performance for each rep across rolling time periods, along with metrics that call out any timing gaps between when deals were supposed to close and when they actually did. It’s also helpful to have alerts for deals that get pushed over and over from one period to the next.
Sales reps will care a lot more about their forecast accuracy when they know that it directly affects their paycheck and performance reviews. It’s human nature – when something gets tracked and linked to compensation, they pay closer attention to it. When your reps put genuine effort into their predictions instead of just guessing, the quality of that data gets better. This ripple effect spreads across the entire organization. Management needs those numbers for planning purposes, whether it’s hiring decisions, budget allocation or figuring out where to focus the resources for the next quarter. When each rep submits a solid forecast, rolling them up into a team or company-wide projection becomes far more reliable.
How Personal and Team Pay Work Together
Sales teams usually do better when their compensation plan includes personal and team-based rewards. From what I’ve seen, most businesses wind up somewhere around a 70/30 or 80/20 split between the two. The bigger portion is based on each person’s own sales numbers, and the smaller piece comes from how the whole team does.
What makes team-based commissions work well is actually pretty simple. Everyone on your entire team is relying on you to meet the group’s goals, and you’re relying on them just as much. When you’re all shooting for the same target together, it builds accountability in a way that personal quotas alone just can’t do. Nobody wants to be the person who ends up costing their teammates a chunk of their paycheck.
Every manager has dealt with that one rep who seems to coast as everyone else on the team does most of the heavy lifting. It’s frustrating, and it’s one of the biggest reasons why you can’t ignore personal performance when you’re putting together a compensation structure. Every person needs their own targets for their book of business – that’s what holds them accountable for what they actually contribute. At the same time, a team-based part gives everyone a real incentive to share what they know and pitch in when a colleague needs some backup.
Once you find this balance, your reps are going to start sending leads over to teammates who are a better match for those accounts. They’ll actually volunteer to help out on calls where another rep might need some backup to close a deal. The whole team changes once everyone figures out that their own success is directly connected to how well everyone else does, too.
Team targets can also help you spot when a rep is sandbagging their pipeline a little bit. When a rep puts up weak personal numbers but still contributes quite a bit to the team results, that’s pretty obvious. The same thing happens with the rep whose deals always seem to push to the next quarter, as the rest of the team is closing out their deals on time.
Level Up Your Incentives and Rewards
Fortunately, you won’t need to tear apart your entire compensation plan just to get it moving in the right direction. An overhaul done all at once creates more uncertainty than it resolves, and uncertainty will just make sandbagging worse in the short term. One or two targeted changes will give your entire team enough time to understand it and actually adapt to the new structure. Accelerated commission rates are usually the best place to start for most sales organizations since they’re simple to explain and calculate, and your reps will quickly see that faster deals equal more money without any complicated formulas to figure them out.
Fix the sandbagging problem in how you pay your sales team, and the benefits are going to show up all over your business. Revenue gets a lot more predictable because deals close when they’re ready to close – not when everyone’s racing to beat some arbitrary end-of-month deadline. Your customers get a much better experience on their end, too – they’re not left waiting as your reps try to time everything just right on the calendar. Team morale gets better as well once everyone realizes they don’t need to work the system anymore just to hit their number. A solid pay plan makes it so that the right move for your customer and your company is also the most profitable move for your rep.
Level 6 builds incentive programs that make sure your employees want the same outcomes that your business wants. We create sales incentive programs, employee rewards and recognition systems, branded debit cards and custom performance programs – they’re all designed to drive the right behaviors instead of the shortcuts and loopholes that pop up with standard programs. Our platform helps high-performance businesses get better ROI and stronger sales numbers, and we’d be happy to show you how it all works.
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.
