A sales team starts with a simple commission plan. Two years later, it's a 47-page compensation document that feels more like the tax code, and you practically need an accountant just to figure out your commissions each month. Lead routing begins as "round robin by vertical" and morphs into a decision tree with 23 conditional branches. A CRM that was supposed to make life easier now has 142 custom fields on the account object that nobody fills out correctly. And let's not even talk about leads and contacts.
Why does this keep happening? Why do smart, capable GTM leaders consistently turn straightforward processes into Rube Goldberg machines? The answer lies deeper than you think—in psychology, organizational behavior, and our fundamental relationship with complexity. Let's explore what's really happening and how to break the cycle.
Here's an uncomfortable truth: humans are hardwired to add, not subtract. Research from the University of Virginia found that when asked to improve something, people overwhelmingly chose to add new elements rather than remove existing ones even when subtraction was clearly the better solution.
In GTM operations, this manifests everywhere. Your commission plan starts simple: "10% of closed revenue." Then someone closes a multi-year deal and suddenly you need to account for payment terms. Then another rep brings in a strategic partnership and you need carve-outs for channel deals. Before you know it, you've got accelerators, decelerators, clawbacks, SPIFs, and a compensation committee that meets monthly to handle edge cases.
The psychological triggers at play include:
Status and expertise signaling. Complexity makes us look smart. A simple solution can feel like we're not earning our salary. Sales leaders often want sophisticated routing rules to demonstrate strategic value. RevOps leaders build those systems because they want to be viewed as collaborative partners. All the while, customers really just wanted a warm body to call them.
Loss aversion and the "what if" trap. Every exception feels critical. "What if a rep manipulates the system?" "What if we miss revenue from a specific segment?" Rather than handling these rare cases manually, teams build rules for everything. According to prospect theory research from behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, people systematically overweight low-probability risks when designing systems, leading to unnecessary complexity.
The illusion of control. More rules feel like more control. In reality, complexity creates chaos. Sales managers build validation rules and workflows thinking they're ensuring data quality. Instead, reps spend 45 minutes per deal fighting the system and eventually just enter incomplete data to move forward.
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Let's examine the usual areas where overcomplicated GTM operations cause the most damage.
The average B2B SaaS company has a commission plan that's 15-20 pages long. The top performing companies? They typically have plans under 5 pages. Yet when simplification gets proposed, the pushback is immediate: "But what about expansion deals? What about multi-product bundles? What about renewals?"
Here's what actually happens with complex comp plans: 80% of reps can't calculate their own commission. They don't know if they're having a good month. They can't model scenarios. They just wait for the comp statement and hope for the best. That uncertainty destroys the entire point of a commission plan. Commissions are supposed to motivate, but if a rep doesn't understand how they make money, where is the motivation coming from?
Consider a real example: a privately-held, very successful B2B SaaS company I worked with had built a commission structure combining retention of existing business with new revenue. Sounds reasonable, right? The problem: the tiers were so convoluted that tenured reps were qualifying for seven-figure salaries based purely on retention without closing a single new deal. These reps had literally stopped prospecting and rarely paid any attention to new leads in their territory. They were collecting million-dollar paychecks for babysitting old accounts while the company desperately needed new business growth.
The kicker? Nobody could pinpoint exactly which rule in the 40-page comp plan was causing this. Not finance, not the VP of Sales, not even the reps themselves. The plan had become an archaeological artifact with layers of legacy logic that nobody fully understood but everyone was afraid to touch.
The fix? We blew it up and rebuilt from scratch. Two simple structures: a higher commission rate for new business, a much lower rate for renewals. That's it. No tiers, no multipliers, no Byzantine formulas. Everyone could calculate their commission on a napkin. The result: new business activity surged as reps actually started selling again. Retention barely changed because those relationships were solid anyway.
Lead routing should be simple: get the right lead to the right rep as quickly as possible. Instead, routing logic routinely considers account ownership, territory assignment, product interest, company size, industry vertical, lead source, previous engagement history, rep capacity, rep performance tier, and phase of the moon.
The result? Leads sit in queues for 3-7 days while the system tries to find the "perfect" assignee. According to research from Harvard Business Review, response time is the single biggest predictor of qualification rates. Companies that contact leads within an hour are 7x more likely to qualify them than those waiting even 24 hours.
Think about that. Your sophisticated routing algorithm is optimizing for perfect assignment while your competitors are calling the same prospects within 30 minutes. You're losing deals before they even enter your pipeline.
The simple fix: round robin within region or vertical, with overflow rules for PTO. That's it. Speed to lead beats perfect assignment every.single.time.
The pattern is always the same. Year one: "Let's keep Salesforce clean and simple." Year two: "Can we add just a few fields to get this automation out a little faster? Can we add this different version of ARR for the board deck?" Year five: 127 custom objects, 400+ fields, 89 active workflows, and a database that takes 15 seconds to load an account record.
Data from CRM audits shows that less than 30% of custom fields typically have data in more than 10% of records. Reps ignore most fields entirely. But nobody removes anything because "we might need it for reporting." The result: a system that's slow, confusing, and actively avoided by the team it's supposed to help.
Here's a principle worth adopting: if you can't explain why a field exists and who uses it in under 30 seconds, delete it. Field cleanup projects consistently show the same result: sales productivity increases because reps can actually find what they needed. Reporting gets better because people start filling out the fields that actually matter.
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Individual psychology is only part of the story. Organizational dynamics amplify our natural tendency toward complication.
Stakeholder appeasement turns into Frankenstein systems. Every department wants their requirements reflected in GTM systems. Marketing wants attribution tracking. Finance wants revenue recognition fields. Customer success wants health scores. Product wants feature adoption data. RevOps wants peace. Rather than making hard choices about what matters most, teams try to make everyone happy. The result satisfies no one.
Turnover creates archaeological layers. A new RevOps leader inherits systems built by three predecessors. Nobody knows why certain rules exist, but everyone's afraid to touch them. This "infrastructure debt" accumulates. Salesforce workflows run based on scoring models from vendors the company stopped using years ago, generating thousands of tasks per month that reps ignore.
Success creates complexity through exception handling. Every successful company accrues edge cases. Strategic partnerships, custom deal structures, pilot programs, etc. Each project is justified, each one requiring special handling. The problem: exceptions become permanent. That one-time channel deal from 2021? You still have to migrate that to your new CPQ even if it is just one customer. The enterprise pilot program? Still has its own commission structure even though it became the standard offering.
A useful practice: the "sunset rule." Any exception must have an expiration date or quarterly review. If it's truly valuable, make it standard. If not, eliminate it.
So how do we escape the complexity trap? By religiously applying the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Start with the 80/20 rule. Design systems for the 80% of common cases. Handle the other 20% manually out of the gate. Companies that want routing rules for 47 different scenarios often discover that 12 of those scenarios represent less than 1% of total volume. Build rules for the common cases and create a "manual review" queue for everything else. It takes 30 minutes per week to handle exceptions versus months building automation that will inevitably break.
Measure complexity as a KPI. If you don't measure it, you can't manage it. Track "configuration debt" metrics like number of active workflows, number of custom fields, number of validation rules, and exception processes. Set targets to reduce them quarterly. Make "simplification" a standing agenda item in sprint planning. Every sprint, either simplify something or justify why you can't. Small improvements add up over time.
Make subtraction the default. Before adding a new field, workflow, or rule, require the team to remove something of equal or greater complexity. This forces prioritization and prevents endless accumulation.
Test comprehension, not just functionality. Can a new sales rep understand your commission plan in 10 minutes? Can they explain routing logic in 30 seconds? If not, it's too complex. Use "the new hire test." If someone ramping can't grasp how a system works quickly, redesign it.
Ruthlessly eliminate anything that doesn't drive revenue or reduce friction. Audit GTM systems with one question: "Does this directly help close deals, retain customers, or make the team's job easier?" If the answer is no or if nobody can articulate the answer, it goes.
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Let's get concrete with what happens when GTM teams embrace simplification:
Commission plans drop from 18 pages to 3. Product-specific rates, complex accelerators, and quota relief provisions get eliminated. Sales team satisfaction scores jump 40+ points. Voluntary attrition drops by double digits. Reps finally trust that they understand how they're paid, and that trust changes everything.
Seven sales stages collapse into four. Mandatory fields that reps were filling with junk data just to move deals forward get removed. Sales cycles decrease by 10-15 days because reps spend less time on CRM hygiene and more time selling. Forecast accuracy actually improves because the remaining fields capture what actually matters.
Territory-based routing gets replaced with simple round-robin assignment. Lead response time drops from days to hours. More importantly, close rates increase 20%+ because leads get to available reps quickly rather than sitting in queues waiting for the "perfect" territory owner.
Complexity isn't just annoying, it's very expensive. Every unnecessary rule, field, or process creates friction that slows your team, confuses your data, and ultimately costs you revenue.
The companies winning in GTM right now aren't the ones with the most sophisticated systems. They're the ones that have made simplicity a competitive advantage. Their reps spend time selling, not decoding policies. Their operations teams build scalable processes, not one-off exceptions. Their leaders make decisions based on clean data, not archaeological digs through legacy configurations. Their CRO doesn't allow contract exceptions because they know the true cost of supporting.
Here's your action plan:
Audit one complex system this quarter. Pick your commission plan, routing rules, or CRM configuration. Document every rule, field, and exception.
Apply the 80/20 filter. Identify which elements handle 80% of your volume. Flag the rest for elimination or manual handling.
Run the new hire test. Have someone unfamiliar with the system try to explain it. Where they get confused is where you overcomplicated.
Set a complexity budget. Track total workflows, fields, and rules. Commit to reducing by 10-20% over the next two quarters.
Make simplification a team value. Celebrate when someone removes something. Make "can we simplify this?" a required question in design reviews.
The GTM teams that thrive in the next decade won't be the ones with the fanciest tech stacks or the most elaborate processes. They'll be the ones that remember what all this technology was supposed to enable: helping great salespeople do what they do best.
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