Your Commission Agreement Is Probably Illegal and Your Employer Knows It
Legal settlements are piling up over dodgy commission structures, and ANZ sales teams are next in line for a reckoning.
Here's something your CRO won't tell you: there's a decent chance your commission agreement wouldn't survive a Fair Work audit.
Recent legal settlements are exposing what experienced AEs have known for years—half the commission structures in ANZ tech are held together with verbal promises and hope. No signed agreements. Vague accelerator triggers. Comp plans that change mid-quarter with a Slack message and a "thanks for your flexibility."
The problem isn't malice. It's sloppiness at scale.
Fast-growing startups hire their first five AEs, copy-paste a US commission structure, and figure they'll "formalise it later." Series B hits. Headcount doubles. Nobody formalises anything. By the time they're at 30 sellers, three different commission structures are running simultaneously, none of them properly documented.
Then someone misses a payment. Or quota gets revised without comp adjustment. Or an AE leaves and disputes their final commission. Suddenly you're looking at a legal settlement that costs more than the entire sales team's Q4 commission pool.
What this means for you:
If you don't have a signed, written commission agreement that clearly states your OTE split, payment terms, quota relief, and dispute resolution process—you're exposed. Not your employer. You.
When comp disputes go legal, the company has lawyers. You have screenshots of a Slack DM from your manager saying "we'll sort it out."
Do this now:
Request a signed commission agreement in writing. If your company "doesn't do those," you've just learned something important about how they operate. If they send you a vague two-paragraph email, push back. Get specifics: base, OTE, split, payment timing, clawback terms, what happens if quota changes.
Because the next legal settlement? It won't be about some faceless enterprise. It'll be about whether your "competitive OTE" was actually just a number your CRO made up in the Series A deck.
Commission transparency isn't a nice-to-have anymore. It's legal protection.