Only 22% of Reps Hit Quota—Is Your Comp Plan Sabotaging Your GTM?

Only 22% of B2B reps are hitting quota—not because they can’t sell, but because their comp plans are rigged for chaos and burnout. According to CaptivateIQ’s 2025 Sales Compensation Benchmarks Report, most organizations still treat compensation as static, while the market keeps moving.

Broken Quotas. Burned-Out Teams. Broken Trust.

You don’t need another 50-slide sales kickoff to know your team’s fried. The warning signs are blistering: Only 21% of B2B sellers feel fully engaged. Most are just… surviving. And that’s a payout problem as much as it’s a process one.

The same CaptivateIQ study shows a brutal comp-to-close lag. Roughly 30% of organizations report missing payout deadlines by more than 30 days. That’s not rewarding performance—it’s punishing it.

The Real Comp Scandal? Static Incentives in a Dynamic Market

Companies are still shipping last year’s compensation logic into a future-proof battlefield. According to Alexander Group’s 2025 Game Changers Brief, 60% of high-performing companies are adjusting comp plans quarterly. And the laggards? They don’t stand a chance.

That same report details a massive shift toward linking compensation to team goals and customer expansion—not just individual land-and-forget motions. In other words: personalized comp kills resilience. Collective reward models are taking over.

What Happens When Teams Get Sick of Carrying the GTM Weight?

Look around. The SDRs are disengaging. The AEs are booking fake demos. The CS team’s underwater. That’s not an alignment problem. It’s a consequence of giving comp autonomy to siloed leaders instead of structuring it as a system.

Only 19% of sales orgs think their GTM model is future-ready. That’s not a backend issue—it’s a frontline failure.

Time on Task ≠ Time on Target

A shocking 65% of a rep’s time isn’t spent selling. That’s not just inefficiency—it’s operational theft. See the data: Only 35% of reps’ hours go to real selling.

When comp systems reward vanity metrics—like meetings booked or activity logged—real revenue gets left in the gutter. Sellers chase the wrong numbers. Leaders celebrate the wrong dashboards. And everyone wonders why forecast calls feel fictional.

The New Community Equation: Resilience > Rocketship

Old GTM design said: reward top performers, dump the rest. The new model? Build actual ecosystems. Resilient teams. Diverse voices. Shared wins. And yes—shared incentives.

High-performing orgs are ditching “winner-takes-all” accelerators and introducing holistic compensation structures around team performance and customer lifetime value, per Everstage’s 2025 Sales Comp Trends.

This isn’t soft. It’s smart. If your best closer leaves, your system shouldn’t collapse. If your product shifts, your strategy shouldn’t stall. That’s what resilient GTM is about.

From Hero-Model to Health-Model: What To Pay For in 2025

• Revenue from renewals = comp-worthy
• Cross-sell & upsell = bonused
• Referral & advocacy = rewarded
• Churn reduction = paid like new pipeline

The playbook is shifting. And early adopters are already winning. CaptivateIQ found that companies with dynamic, transparent comp systems had 23% higher rep retention and 17% better forecast accuracy.

What Happens Next For GTM Leaders?

If this sounds like a call-out… it is. Your comp structure isn’t just math. It’s the blueprint for behavior. And right now, that blueprint is leaking revenue, talent, and trust.

Modernizing compensation isn’t optional. It’s existential. And it’s the only way to build a GTM engine that doesn’t break every hiring season.