Redesigning a sales commission scheme on real transaction data

The challenge

A tutoring marketplace wanted its sales commission scheme to reward what the business actually needed: new-customer acquisition. The existing scheme had grown organically and pulled in a different direction. Changing compensation is high-stakes — get it wrong and you overpay, underpay, or incentivise the wrong behaviour, and you rarely get a second chance at trust.

What we did

We rebuilt the question as a simulation. Using years of transaction history across the full sales team, we modelled the current scheme and candidate redesigns side by side — replaying real sales through each scheme to compare total cost, per-person earnings shifts, and how strongly each design rewards bringing in new customers versus servicing existing ones.

The outcome

The decision moved from opinion to arithmetic. Leadership could see exactly what each candidate scheme would have cost historically, who would have earned more or less, and which design paid most sharply for acquisition — and could tune the rates with the trade-offs in full view before rolling anything out.