Becca Lindquist, Head of Sales at Clay, has a strong opinion on how early-stage startups should pay their sales teams. Forget the trend of simply putting reps on salary. That approach, she argues, kills the very drive you need to scale fast.

Lindquist recalls her time at Heap, an analytics startup, where she found herself in an environment where everyone, regardless of performance, collected the same salary. Her reaction was simple: "Huh, okay." It didn't take long for her to realize that to truly build a winning sales culture, incentives needed to be razor-sharp and tied directly to results.

She champions a variable compensation model so aggressive it makes most early-stage founders squirm. But it worked. Lindquist recalls, “I have never run harder at a goal in my life than when I knew that I was going to make 25% of every single deal that I closed.” This isn't just a hypothetical; it's a blueprint built on a simple premise: align company incentives with individual rep hunger.

The Heap's Early-Stage Sales Compensation Plan

Here's how Heap structured their compensation in the early days to drive extreme performance, as shared by Becca Lindquist:

  • Base Salary: We had a base salary And like I don't know this was like 2015 San Francisco I think our base salary was like 60k.
  • Base Salary Payback: Every deal that we closed we had to pay back our base salary so like every month it was like I don't know five grand. So the first five grand of revenue was a wash.
  • Commission Rate (Standard Deals): Beyond that every dollar that we closed we got 25%.
  • Commission Rate (Two-Year Deals): And if it was a two-year deal, every dollar in that 2-year deal, we got 33%.

When This Works (and When It Doesn't)

This compensation structure is a rocket fuel for startups in specific conditions. Lindquist notes it “aligned our incentives with the company's incentives very very directly and we just like sprinted at it.” It works best when your product-market fit is established enough that sales can be replicated, and the primary goal is rapid customer acquisition. It's ideal for early-stage companies needing to quickly prove revenue models and build momentum, especially when individual sales efforts directly translate to closed deals.

However, this plan can backfire. If your product is nascent, sales cycles are extremely long, or deals require heavy cross-functional collaboration, an aggressive individual commission can lead to short-sighted behaviors, internal friction, and churn. It also puts intense pressure on reps; while it cultivates a "winning culture" where “60% of people over 100%, 80% over 80%” hit their targets, it can also burn out those who struggle to meet such high expectations.

What to Do With This

If you're a founder launching your first sales team for a B2B SaaS product, scrap the idea of a flat salary. Instead, design your Q3 compensation plan with aggressive variable components like Heap's. Set a competitive base (e.g., $75k in a competitive market) but institute a clear "base salary payback" where the first $6,250 of monthly closed-won revenue offsets the base. Then, implement a 25% commission on all subsequent annual contract value (ACV) for standard deals, and add an accelerator—say, 33% commission—for any deals closed on two-year contracts. This forces reps to hunt for larger, longer commitments and ensures every deal directly impacts their earnings from day one.