En bref : La plupart des start-up suisses importent un plan de commission américain conçu pour une autre culture salariale, puis s'étonnent que les commerciaux ratent leurs objectifs, rejettent ce risque et que les meilleurs s'en aillent discrètement.
Ninety-one per cent of companies missed their number last year
Here is the statistic every founder building a first sales team should sit with. In 2024, 91 per cent of companies failed to reach even 80 per cent of their quota, per QuotaPath’s survey of more than 450 revenue, finance and sales leaders. Missing target is not the exception in business-to-business sales. It is the base rate.
When an entire market misses, the fault rarely sits with the salespeople. It sits with the plan they were handed. A sales compensation plan quietly decides which deals get chased, which get ignored, and whether a strong closer is still on the team in year two. For a Swiss startup — small headcount, expensive talent, investors watching the burn — a badly wired plan is one of the quickest ways to waste money.
A compensation plan is a behaviour contract, not a payroll line
Revenue Operations (RevOps) treats compensation as the sharpest instrument a company holds over sales behaviour. Every representative reads a plan the same way: what is the shortest route to the largest cheque? Whatever the answer, that is what the team will do, regardless of what gets said at the quarterly all-hands.
So the design question is never “what feels fair”. It is “what behaviour does this plan pay for”. A plan that rewards signed logos will produce logos, some of them poor fits that churn within six months. A plan that pays on annual contract value pushes reps toward longer commitments and better-qualified buyers. On-target earnings (OTE), the quota, the accelerators above target and the gates below it are all behavioural levers, and each one aims the team somewhere specific.
The clearest symptom of a broken plan is complexity. QuotaPath flags the warning signs bluntly: a plan that takes more than a minute to explain, and a standing reliance on SPIFs (sales performance incentive funds) to patch behaviour the base plan should already drive. If a rep cannot calculate their own commission on the back of a napkin, the plan is steering nobody.
The US 50/50 template carries too little base for a Swiss rep
Most comp templates circulating online are American. The default there is a 50/50 split between base salary and variable commission for a mature account executive (AE), tilting toward a heavier base only at pre-product-market-fit companies, according to Pave’s analysis of thousands of US reps. Dropped into Geneva or Zurich, that 50/50 misfires.
Swiss pay culture runs on stability. Salaries are high — the median account executive earns around CHF 95,000 a year — and a 13th-month salary is treated as a near-universal expectation rather than a bonus. Candidates weigh the guaranteed portion heavily, and a plan that puts half of a senior salary at risk reads as unserious to the exact people a startup most wants to hire. The variable share also carries employer social charges: AVS (assurance-vieillesse et survivants) alone runs to 10.6 per cent split between employer and employee, and total employer contributions land near 13 to 14 per cent of gross — so every commission franc costs the company more than its face value.
The practical consequence: a Swiss startup usually starts nearer a 60/40 or 70/30 base-to-variable mix and moves toward heavier leverage only once the sales motion becomes predictable. The commission still has to bite — a token bonus motivates no one — but the guaranteed floor has to respect what the market actually pays.
Quota should be set so most of the team can clear it
A quota is a forecast of what a capable rep can close, not a stretch figure pulled from the board deck. Across the industry, average attainment sits around 45 to 50 per cent, drawing on CSO Insights and Salesforce data, while a healthily calibrated plan has roughly 60 to 70 per cent of reps at or above target. If only the top performer ever hits the number, the quota is broken, and the plan is training everyone else to give up by mid-quarter.
For an early Swiss team the discipline is to set the quota from real capacity — pipeline coverage, win rates, average deal size and sales-cycle length — then revisit it as data accumulates. Guessing high to look ambitious in a fundraising deck produces demoralised reps and unreliable revenue, which is the opposite of what an investor is buying.
What RevOps changes first in a Swiss startup’s plan
Fixing compensation is unglamorous and high-value. The moves that matter most: pay on one or two metrics a rep can influence directly, not five; anchor the base to Swiss market rates and treat the variable as real upside on top; set quota from demonstrated capacity and review it quarterly; and pressure-test the whole thing by asking a rep to explain their own plan in one sentence. If they cannot, it goes back to the drawing board.
This is the work Pupsic does with SMEs and post-seed startups across Switzerland — wiring the comp plan, the quota model and the CRM so the incentives and the revenue goals finally point the same way. Founders rebuilding a plan that is fighting them can start a conversation with Pupsic and pressure-test the design before the next hire signs.
Références
- QuotaPath. 2024 Compensation Trends: Why 91% of Sales Teams Missed Quota. https://www.quotapath.com/blog/sales-teams-miss-quota/
- Pave. Getting to 50/50 — the Data Behind Sales Compensation. https://www.pave.com/blog-posts/getting-to-50-50-the-data-behind-sales-compensation
- SalesFit. Sales Quota Attainment Benchmarks 2025. https://salesfit.ai/blog/sales-quota-attainment-benchmarks-2025
- Talent.com. Account Executive Average Salary in Switzerland. https://ch.talent.com/en/salary?job=account+executive
- Findea. Social Security Contributions Switzerland: Employer Overview. https://www.findea.ch/en/faq-fiduciary/social-security-contributions-switzerland-employers
