Compensation in an acquisition team is a system design problem, not a generosity problem. Whatever you pay for is what you will get more of, including the versions you did not want, and most bad pipelines can be traced directly to what somebody was being paid to produce.
The mistake that ruins the data
Paying cold callers per appointment booked, with nothing else attached, reliably produces appointments that are not appointments. Not through dishonesty, through pressure. A caller a few short of target on a Friday will book conversations that should have been marked dead, and the closer inherits a calendar of people who did not really agree to anything.
Once that starts, your conversion rate becomes meaningless, and you cannot tell whether calling or closing is the problem. The corruption of the measurement is more expensive than the wasted appointments.
Pay callers for the thing you can verify
A structure that works: a solid base tied to the shift being worked, plus a bonus on appointments that survive a quality bar rather than on appointments booked.
- Base: the majority of pay, tied to hours and consistency, because calling is endurance work
- Activity floor: a minimum dial count, treated as a requirement rather than something to earn a bonus for
- Quality bonus: paid on appointments the closer confirms were genuinely qualified, not on the raw count
- Contract bonus: a smaller amount when a lead they sourced signs, so they see the far end of their work
The key detail is that the appointment bonus is confirmed by somebody other than the person earning it. Self-attested quality is not quality.
Pay closers on outcomes, but not only on outcomes
Closers are the right role for genuine commission, because contracts are unambiguous. But pure commission has a failure mode: closers cherry-pick the easy leads and abandon everything that needs three follow-ups, which is where a large fraction of deals actually come from.
A base plus commission, with a small component tied to follow-up discipline, leads contacted within 24 hours, leads worked more than once, corrects that without capping the upside.
Getting the ratio right
The general shape: callers should be mostly base with a meaningful bonus, closers should be meaningfully commissioned with a base that covers a lean month. The reason is variance. A caller controls their inputs completely and their outcomes barely; a closer controls their outcomes substantially.
Paying a caller mostly on outcomes punishes them for list quality, which they did not choose and cannot fix. That is the fastest way to lose good callers.
Team bonuses
A small shared component on team contracts is worth having. It is what makes a caller take the extra thirty seconds to write a proper note, because the closer converting is now partly their business too. Keep it small, large team bonuses dilute individual accountability.
What to avoid
- Paying per dial: you will get four hundred two-second dials and no conversations
- Paying per lead marked interested: the caller controls the label, so the label stops meaning anything
- Commission with no base for callers: high turnover, and the good ones leave first
- Changing structures often: people optimise for whatever was announced last, and constant change produces constant churn in behaviour
- Deductions framed as penalties: they damage morale far more than the equivalent bonus motivates
Review the structure against the pipeline, not the payroll
Once a quarter, ask a simple question: what behaviour did we pay for, and what behaviour did we get. If appointment counts rose and contracts did not, the caller incentive is producing volume at the expense of truth, and it needs changing before the next quarter compounds the problem.