How Do I Stop My Reps From Only Selling the Easy Product in 2026?

Two ways to fix it: re-price the behavior or re-build the capability

Almost every attempt to change what a sales team sells falls into one of two camps, and leaders usually pick the wrong one first because it is the cheaper one to announce.

Option A — re-price the behavior. This is the economic lever. You change the compensation plan, the SPIFFs, the accelerators, the quota structure, and the leaderboard so that the strategic product becomes the highest-earning use of a rep's hour. Differential commission rates, mix gates, per-product quotas, and multipliers all live here. The premise is that reps are rational actors optimizing against the scoreboard you gave them, so if you change the scoreboard, the behavior follows within a pay cycle or two.

Option B — re-build the capability. This is the enablement lever. You accept that the rep is not avoiding the hard product out of greed but out of discomfort: they cannot run a discovery call that surfaces the pain the strategic product solves, they have no answer to the third objection, and they have never watched anyone close one. So you build battle cards, record top-performer calls, run structured role-play, pair reps on joint calls, and shorten the collateral until the strategic product is as easy to talk about as the commodity one.

The honest answer is that these are not alternatives — they are a sequence, and the order matters more than the choice. Re-pricing alone, applied to a team that genuinely cannot sell the complex line, produces a quarter of frustrated reps who chase the multiplier, botch the discovery, lose the deals, miss their number, and go right back to the easy product with a grudge. You will have spent real money to teach the team that the strategic product is a trap. Re-building capability alone, applied to a team whose comp still pays better per hour on the commodity, produces beautifully trained reps who politely ignore the training. They know what pays.

There is a third camp worth naming because leaders reach for it in frustration: restriction. Cap the easy product, remove it from the price book for certain segments, route commodity inbound to a lower-cost inside team, or refuse to quote it standalone. This is not a coaching lever at all — it is a portfolio decision. Sometimes it is exactly right (the easy product is a margin-destroying loss leader that only exists because a rep can move it), and sometimes it destroys your best land-and-expand motion overnight. Treat restriction as surgery, not medicine. If you do use it, the least destructive version is routing rather than banning: the easy product still gets sold, just not by the people you need selling something harder.

A useful way to hold all three in your head is that Option A changes *what a rep wants to do*, Option B changes *what a rep can do*, and restriction changes *what a rep is allowed to do*. Almost every failed initiative I have seen pulled exactly one of those levers and expected the other two to follow on their own.

How to decide which lever to pull first

Do not guess. There is a cheap diagnostic that tells you whether you have a want problem or a can problem, and it takes about two hours with your CRM export.

Pull the last 60–90 days of closed and lost opportunities and compute two numbers per rep. First, commission per selling hour by product: take average commission per closed deal on each line, divide by average sales-cycle touch time. If the easy product pays $600 in commission on a 14-day cycle with maybe six hours of rep effort, that is $100/hour. If the strategic product pays $2,400 on a 90-day cycle with thirty hours of effort, that is $80/hour. The rep who leans on the commodity is not being lazy; they are being 25% smarter than your plan. That is a want problem, and comp is the first lever.

Second, strategic attempt rate versus strategic win rate. If reps are *pitching* the strategic product at a healthy clip — say it appears in 40% of opportunities — but winning it at 8%, they want to sell it and cannot. That is a can problem, and enablement is the first lever. If it appears in 6% of opportunities but wins at 35% when it does show up, the product sells fine; nobody is bringing it up. Back to comp and process.

The failure case worth watching for is the rep who scores badly on both. Low attempt rate *and* low win rate usually means the strategic product has never been positioned to them as winnable, and the fix is neither comp nor training in isolation — it is a manager riding along on five deals until the rep sees one close.

Run that decision once per segment, not once per company. Enterprise reps and SMB reps almost never have the same bottleneck, and a single global fix applied to both will overcorrect one of them.

The numbers behind each lever

Vague advice is why this problem survives. Here are the ranges that actually move behavior, with the caveat that every one of them should be modeled against your own margin before you publish it.

Differential commission rates. The multiplier that reliably changes behavior sits between 1.5x and 3x. If the easy product pays 5%, the strategic line should pay 10–15%. Below roughly 1.5x, the rep does the math on cycle length and correctly concludes the premium does not cover the extra risk and calendar time. Above 3x, you usually create a different pathology — reps who force the strategic product into accounts that do not need it, which shows up six months later as churn and discounting.

The time-to-close correction. A multiplier alone is not enough when cycle length differs sharply. Three easy deals at 14 days each versus one strategic deal at 90 days is not a fair comparison of effort; it is a comparison of cash flow. Reps live on monthly commission. Two tools fix this: a draw against commission during the ramp (typically 60–120 days, recoverable against future earnings) so the rep stays financially whole while building a longer pipeline, and milestone-based partial payouts — pay 30% of the commission at signed proposal or verbal, 70% at contract, so the rep sees money mid-cycle rather than at day 90 only.

Mix gates instead of penalties. Punishing easy-product sales breeds resentment and gaming. A gate rewards instead: require a floor — say two strategic deals or 25% of quota dollars from strategic lines per quarter — to unlock the top accelerator tier on *all* products. The rep who sells nothing but the commodity still earns a fair living; they just do not reach the 1.4x accelerator that turns a good quarter into a great one. That framing survives the town-hall Q&A in a way a clawback never does.

Per-product quota, not blended quota. A single blended dollar number is the single largest structural cause of this problem. Split it: e.g. 70% of quota from any product, 30% carved out as strategic-line-specific. Reps cannot backfill the carve-out with commodity volume. Start the carve-out small — 20–25% in the first quarter — and step it up as capability builds. Setting it at 50% on day one against an untrained team is how you lose your two best reps to a competitor.

Discovery time as a leading indicator. Watch average discovery-call duration on strategic opportunities. If it is running under 15 minutes, reps are qualifying on features and price — commodity muscle memory. Complex products are sold on cost of inaction, business impact, and decision process, and none of those surface in a 12-minute call. A reasonable target is 30–45 minutes of genuine discovery before any pricing conversation, with a written summary of the impact back to the buyer.

Coaching cadence. A single 30-minute weekly pipeline meeting is not coaching, it is reporting. For strategic deals, review recorded calls within 24–48 hours and look for one specific thing: the moment the rep pivoted from positioning the strategic product to offering the commodity as a fallback. That pivot is the whole problem in miniature. It is almost always a confidence gap on one objection, and it is coachable in a single role-play session — but only if you catch it inside the same week.

Enablement asymmetry. Count the pages. If the easy product has a one-pager plus a two-minute demo video and the strategic product has a 40-page PDF, you have built a system that punishes the harder sale with more homework. Get the strategic product to parity: a one-page battle card, a 90-second value video, five scripted objection handlers, and an ROI calculator the rep can fill out live on a call. Reps sell what they can explain in ninety seconds.

Realistic timelines. Expect the first visible shift in one to two full commission cycles — roughly 30–60 days. Cycle one is testing and grumbling; cycle two is when reps who ran the math start reallocating their calendar. Durable mix change, where the new behavior survives without weekly reinforcement, typically takes three to four months and requires that at least one mid-tier rep — not just your top performer — visibly wins big on the strategic line. That single proof point does more than any slide deck.

On tooling: the categories that matter are scorecard and coaching platforms (Ambition), gamified leaderboards (Spinify), CRM-native custom scorecards (Salesforce), commission tracking and quota attainment visibility (QuotaPath, CaptivateIQ), and call recording for review. Pricing varies widely and moves constantly, so quote it fresh from the vendor rather than from anyone's blog post — including this one. The important design point is not which tool you buy but that the scorecard and the payout run off the same weighted lines. When the dashboard celebrates one thing and the commission statement pays another, reps believe the commission statement.

Sequencing the rollout without blowing up the quarter

Order of operations is where most of these programs die. Below is a sequence that survives contact with a real sales floor.

Weeks 1–2: diagnose and model, silently. Run the commission-per-hour and attempt/win-rate analysis. Model the new plan against last year's actual bookings, rep by rep. The question you must answer before anything is announced: under the new plan, what does each rep earn on last year's exact performance? If your top two reps take a pay cut on identical output, you have not built an incentive, you have built a resignation letter. Adjust until the plan is neutral-to-positive for anyone already selling a healthy mix.

Weeks 2–4: build enablement before you announce comp. This is the step everyone skips. Record three top-performer calls on the strategic line. Write the battle card. Script the five objections. Build the ROI calculator. Ship it all *before* the comp change so that on announcement day, the rep's first thought is "here is how" rather than "here is another thing I will fail at."

Week 4: announce with the math visible. Publish the plan and the matrix openly — every rep should be able to see exactly where they stand and what the next dollar is worth. Walk through a worked example live: one strategic deal at the new rate versus the equivalent number of commodity deals, including cycle time. Transparency here is not a nicety; the plan only works if reps trust the arithmetic enough to change their calendar around it.

Weeks 5–12: coach the pivot moment. Weekly, per rep, one recorded strategic call reviewed with specific feedback. Track attempt rate as your leading indicator — it moves weeks before revenue does. If attempt rate is climbing and win rate is flat, keep coaching; that is normal for the first 6–8 weeks. If attempt rate is flat, your comp change was too small or your gate was too easy to clear on commodity volume.

Weeks 8–14: change what you celebrate. Reserve the first three minutes of every standup for strategic wins, with the rep telling the story of how they navigated the complexity. Move commodity wins to a quick acknowledgment at the end. Create a visible tier — call it whatever fits your culture — that carries real benefits: priority lead routing, dedicated solution-engineer time, a higher accelerator cap. Culture is the lever that makes the change stick after the novelty of the comp plan wears off, and it costs almost nothing.

Quarter 2: re-measure and re-weight. Recompute commission per selling hour under the new plan. Markets move, products mature, and a strategic line that needed a 3x multiplier in Q1 may only need 1.8x once reps are fluent and references exist. Over-paying a multiplier you no longer need is just margin leakage.

Two adjacent effects to plan for, because they arrive whether you plan or not. First, deal desk and pricing load goes up. Complex deals mean more custom quotes, more approvals, more legal redlines. If your approval chain takes five business days, you have just added five days to every strategic cycle and partly undone your own multiplier. Second, post-sale delivery gets harder. Strategic products usually carry implementation risk, and a sales team that suddenly sells three times as many of them can overwhelm an onboarding team sized for the commodity mix. Talk to services before you talk to the sales floor. Nothing kills a mix shift faster than the first three strategic customers having a bad implementation and the reps hearing about it.

Adjacent situations where the same pattern shows up

This is not really a comp problem or a training problem. It is the general case of *a team optimizing against a measurable proxy instead of the outcome you actually want*, and once you recognize the shape you will see it everywhere in revenue operations.

Services attach on product deals. Same mechanics exactly. The rep sells the platform, skips the implementation package because it invites a price objection, and the customer onboards badly and churns at month nine. Fix: attach rate as a named line on the scorecard, services commission at parity with product, and a deal-review question — "why no services on this one?" — that must be answered, not skipped.

New product launches. A brand-new line has no references, no case studies, and no rep who has closed one. The commodity is not just easier, it is genuinely lower-risk for the rep's paycheck. Launch playbooks that work usually carry a temporary bonus — a fixed SPIFF on the first three deals company-wide, not per rep — plus a named launch champion whose deals get reviewed publicly so everyone sees what a win looks like.

Renewals and expansion versus new logos. The mirror image: teams that pay lavishly on new business and treat renewal as administrative discover their CSMs quietly stop expanding. Expansion revenue is usually the cheapest revenue in the building, and it is routinely the worst-compensated.

Field service and route-based businesses. A route driver who could upsell at every stop but never does is running the same calculation as your enterprise rep: the upsell adds five minutes, invites a "no," and pays the same as the drop-off. Per-stop attach bonuses, a scripted one-sentence offer, and a manager riding along for a day fix it — the identical three levers at a different scale.

Channel and partner selling. Your partners have the same easy-product bias, amplified, because they carry three vendors' catalogs and will always lead with whichever one is simplest to quote. Partner enablement is just rep enablement with less leverage and more competition for attention, which means the margin premium usually has to be larger, not smaller, to move them.

The general lesson: whenever a team consistently does the easy version of a job, look at the scoreboard before you look at the people. The scoreboard is almost always telling them the truth about what you reward, and it is almost always saying something different from what leadership says out loud. Reps are extremely good at hearing the scoreboard.

Related questions

How much should the strategic product's commission exceed the easy one?

A 1.5x to 3x multiplier is the working range. Below 1.5x, reps correctly judge the premium too small for the longer cycle and higher risk. Above 3x, you invite forced-fit deals that churn. Model it as commission per selling hour, not per deal.

Should I just stop selling the easy product?

Rarely. It often funds the land-and-expand motion and covers fixed cost. If it genuinely destroys margin, route it to a lower-cost inside team or self-serve rather than banning it outright — a ban removes an entry point, routing just removes the distraction.

How do I know it's a skill gap and not a motivation gap?

Compare strategic attempt rate to strategic win rate. High attempts plus low wins means a skill gap — they are trying and losing. Low attempts plus decent wins means a motivation or awareness gap — nobody brings it up, but it closes fine when they do.

Will penalizing easy-product sales work?

No. Clawbacks and rate reductions on the commodity breed resentment and creative gaming. A gate works better: require a minimum strategic mix to unlock the top accelerator on every product. You reward the behavior you want rather than punishing the one you tolerate.

How long before the product mix actually changes?

Attempt rate moves in 30–60 days, roughly two commission cycles. Durable mix change takes three to four months and usually requires one mid-tier rep visibly winning big on the strategic line — that proof point convinces the floor far faster than any announcement.

FAQ

Why do my reps always push the easiest product instead of the one we need to sell?

Because your plan pays better per hour on the easy line, or because nobody has shown them how to win the hard one. Reps are optimizing rationally against the scoreboard you built. Compute commission per selling hour by product — if the commodity wins that math, the rep is behaving correctly and the plan is wrong.

Won't a higher commission on the hard product just make my reps complain?

Some will grumble in the first cycle. Most adapt once the math is visible and works in their favor. Model the plan against each rep's prior-year actuals before announcing so nobody takes a pay cut on identical output, then walk the floor through a worked example: one strategic deal versus the equivalent commodity volume, cycle time included.

What if my reps genuinely lack the skills for the complex sale?

Then a comp change alone makes it worse — they will chase the multiplier, lose the deals, and retreat. Record three top-performer calls on the strategic line, build a one-page battle card and five scripted objection handlers, and role-play weekly until the responses are automatic. Ship the enablement before you announce the comp change.

How do I handle the cash-flow problem when the strategic sale takes 90 days?

Two mechanisms. A recoverable draw against commission during a 60–120 day ramp keeps the rep whole while they build a longer pipeline. Milestone payouts — roughly 30% at signed proposal, 70% at contract — put money in their hands mid-cycle instead of only at day 90. Without one of these, the multiplier is theoretical.

Should I use a blended quota or separate per-product quotas?

Separate. A single blended dollar target is the biggest structural cause of this problem because commodity volume can backfill everything. Carve out a strategic-line-specific portion — start around 20–25% of quota and step it up as capability builds. Setting it at 50% against an untrained team is how you lose your best reps.

What's the earliest signal that the change is working?

Strategic attempt rate — how often the product appears in an opportunity at all. It moves weeks before revenue does. If attempts climb while win rate stays flat for six to eight weeks, that is normal and you keep coaching. If attempts stay flat, your multiplier was too small or your mix gate is clearing on commodity volume alone.

Sources

• https://hbr.org/2012/07/motivating-salespeople-what-really-works
• https://www.gartner.com/en/sales
• https://www.forrester.com/blogs/category/sales/
• https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights
• https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/topics/compensation
• https://www.salesforce.com/blog/sales-compensation-plans/
• https://www.worldatwork.org/resources/publications/workspan
• https://www.saleshacker.com/
• https://www.ama.org/topics/sales/

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