How Collectly Built an Effective Sales Commission Structure for Usage-Based Revenue with Bridges
Collectly is a healthcare SaaS company that processes payments and recovers outstanding accounts receivable for healthcare providers, earning a percentage of what it collects.
We needed a comp plan that didn't punish the company for paying out on revenue that never showed up — but also didn't punish reps for something they couldn't control.
— Levon Brutyan, Co-Founder & CEO
Challenge
Why Collectly's Commission Plan Punished the Company for Its Own Revenue Model
Collectly is a healthcare SaaS company that processes payments and recovers outstanding accounts receivable for healthcare providers, earning a percentage of what it collects. As a revenue cycle management (RCM) platform, Collectly doesn't sell annual contract value the way most B2B SaaS companies do. Revenue only materializes after a client goes live and starts processing, and how much volume that client generates is genuinely uncertain at signing.
Before Tim Salikhov — founder of Bridges — joined, Collectly ran its commission plan like a traditional subscription SaaS company: reps were paid 10% of the estimated deal value the moment a contract was signed. The estimate came from the sales rep closing the deal.
That structure created two problems at once. Deal values were inconsistently estimated against what the revenue-based billing actually produced, with some deals landing above projection and many landing below it. And because Collectly paid out 100% upfront against monthly usage revenue that arrived gradually, the company was extending cash before it had collected what it had promised to pay reps for. This was five months after Collectly's $25 million Series A, led by Sapphire Ventures, when the mandate to build sustainable, scalable systems became urgent.
"It wasn't that deals fell apart. Reality just turned out different from the estimate — some deals came in bigger, but a lot of them landed below what we'd projected."
Solution
How Bridges Rebuilt Commission Around What Actually Gets Paid
Tim's first move was diagnostic: he pulled twelve months of historical deals and compared signed deal value against actual realized revenue. The pattern was clear — estimates were unreliable, and the company had no independent check on the numbers driving commission payouts.
A Deal Desk That Took Estimation Out of Sales' Hands
Tim removed reps' ability to set their own deal value estimates and routed every new deal through a centralized deal desk instead.
- Built a scoring model using leading indicators from each client's profile, including accumulated accounts receivable and specialty type.
- Required every deal estimate to run through the desk before it could be used for commission calculations.
- Tracked estimated-versus-actual deal value by cohort to keep refining the scoring inputs over time.
Once estimates came from a model instead of a rep's own forecast, the company finally had a deal value it could trust enough to build a payout schedule on. That gave Tim a reliable number to attach commission timing to — which became the next problem to solve.
A Milestone Payout Structure Tied to Real Cash Flow
With a trustworthy deal estimate in hand, Tim worked with the founders and VP of Sales to restructure when commissions actually got paid, splitting payout into stages tied to revenue realization instead of paying everything at signing.
- Paid 20% at signing and 20% at go-live, with the remaining 60% paid quarterly against actual revenue.
- Ran a true-up against actual results each quarter instead of ever clawing back money already paid.
- Added an accelerator kicker for reps who exceeded quota across their book over a trailing 12 months.
Spreading payout this way aligned commission expense with the cash Collectly was actually collecting, while the accelerator gave reps real upside instead of just downside risk. That shifted the sales team's incentive away from landing a big number and toward making sure the number held up — which raised a new question: who stays accountable for that after signing.
A Structure That Held Up Through the Full Customer Lifecycle
Tim helped structure, document, and maintain the commission plan so reps stayed accountable for deal performance well past signing, with clear rules for how they were paid as usage played out.
- Defined how reps earned commission on upsell activity within their accounts for a full year post-sale.
- Built in incentives specifically for multi-year agreements, not just initial deal size.
- Made revenue reporting visible to reps in real time so they could see how their accounts were tracking against estimates.
Because reps now had a documented, predictable stake in what happened after signing, clients got more sustained attention from both sales and customer success instead of being dropped the moment the contract closed. The result was a commission plan that gave the sales org structure to grow into, not just a payout schedule.
"Having clear rules for how upside worked after go-live gave reps a real sense that they could still influence the size of the deal, even after the client was live. That mattered as much as the 40% they knew was guaranteed."
Results
Collectly Now Builds a Sales Org That Grows With the Business, Not Against It
The commission overhaul stopped sales comp from working against Collectly's cash position and turned it into a tool for recruiting and retention in a usage-based revenue model that most B2B SaaS sales hires had never been compensated under.
- 90% deal value forecast accuracy — the deal desk model closed the gap between estimated and actual revenue that used to drive overpayment.
- 3x increase in upsell attach rate — extended rep ownership turned post-sale relationships into a second revenue stream instead of a handoff.
- 2x faster sales hire ramp-to-quota — a guaranteed 40% of commission and clear post-signing rules made the plan easier to recruit and ramp reps against.
What started as a cash flow problem became the revenue cycle management structure Collectly now uses to pay, retain, and grow its sales team in lockstep with usage-based billing.
"The plan isn't exciting on a slide. It's exciting in the bank account — because now what we pay out actually matches what came in."