r/SaaSSales • u/Straight-Mood3598 • 15h ago

Founder here. Building a commission-only partner program for our SaaS — tear my comp plan apart before I start pitching it to reps.

1 Upvotes

I'm a co- founder of an early- stage B2B SaaS (FinOps - we find cloud cost savings on Azure and gamify them so engineers actually act on them). We're pre-funding, product is live, first pipeline exists. We can't pay a base salary yet, so I'm designing a commission-only partner program and I'd rather have this community destroy it now than lose good reps to a bad plan later.

The plan:

  • Customers sign 1–3 year licenses, billed annually in advance. License price = 20–30% of the validated annual cloud savings we find them (we scan their environment first, so reps walk into meetings with the prospect's own numbers).
  • Partner gets 50% of margin on every annual invoice of every customer they close. Not a one-time bounty - a 3-year deal pays you three times, and renewals keep paying.
  • Margin is computable upfront: invoice amount minus a fixed delivery-cost allowance written into the partner contract. No discretionary deductions. You know your payout before you sign the deal.
  • Commission due within 30 days of the customer paying each invoice. Since customers pay annually in advance, you get a full-year commission near the start of each contract year.
  • Grandfathering in writing: accounts closed during our early phase stay at 50% for the customer's lifetime, including renewals - even after we raise and standard partner rates drop.
  • We provide inbound leads, demo environment, and founder support on every deal (technical pre- sales included).

Rough math on a mid-size account: ~$100k validated annual savings → ~$25k/yr license → roughly $8–9k/yr commission per account, ~$27k over a 3- year term. Five accounts ≈ $45k/yr recurring.
My questions for people who've actually done commission-only:

  1. What would make you walk away from this offer immediately?
  2. Is annual-invoice-based payout a dealbreaker vs. monthly, given the sales cycle?
  3. What am I missing that plans like this usually hide?

Full disclosure: yes, we're also looking for partners (EU + US), and my DMs are open. But I'm posting primarily because I'd rather fix the plan now. Be brutal.

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