It happens every year. January starts clean. You've got your number, you've got your plan, you know the accelerators. You're building pipeline against a set of rules you agreed to. Then sometime in the first or second week of February, a calendar invite shows up from your VP of Sales with the subject line "FY26 Comp Plan Updates."
Updates. Not "changes." Never "changes." Always "updates" or "refinements" or "adjustments to better align incentives with company priorities." The language is carefully chosen because the intent is carefully hidden: they're moving the goalposts after you've already started running.
I spent twenty years watching this play out at carriers and it follows the same pattern every time. The board sets revenue targets in October. Finance builds comp plans in November. Plans go live January 1. Then the Q4 numbers come in and they're either too good or too bad. If they're too good, leadership realizes the accelerators are going to cost more than they budgeted, so they cap them. If they're too bad, they raise the baseline targets to make the board deck look achievable. Either way, the rep loses.
February is when they do it because the timing is strategic. You're five weeks into the fiscal year. You've already moved deals into the new pipeline. You've made commitments to customers based on the rates you were given in January. You're too deep to start over somewhere else. They know this. That's the whole point.
The most common February move is the retroactive territory adjustment. They split your territory. Or they "realign" accounts. Or they bring in a new overlay team that suddenly has coverage rights on your best customers. Your number stays the same. Your territory gets smaller. They frame it as "adding resources to help you." You know what it actually is.
The second most common move is the accelerator cap. You were told uncapped. In January, uncapped. In February, "uncapped with a true-up threshold." Meaning there's a cap. They just used different words until you were too committed to push back.
If you're in channel sales and your comp plan hasn't changed yet this February, give it a week. And when it does, don't waste energy being surprised. Read the new plan carefully. Model your worst-case scenario. And start building your exit plan — not because you need to leave tomorrow, but because the best time to negotiate is when you don't have to.
I tell every rep the same thing: your comp plan is a proposal, not a contract. They can change it. They will change it. Plan accordingly.