What Commission Rate Should You Pay a Closer?

Set the commission too low and good closers will scroll straight past your offer. Set it too high and you lose money on every customer they bring in. So where is the right number?

If you're new to the model itself, start with commission-only closers for SaaS. For the rate, I think it depends on three things: your margin, the sales motion and how much of the work the closer actually does. Most founders start from a gut feeling instead, usually a round number like twenty percent, and then they wonder why the offer gets nobody or gets the wrong people, when the real problem is that the number was never tied to what a customer is worth to them in the first place.

Start from what a customer is worth to you

The ceiling for any commission is what you would otherwise spend to win the same customer. So add up what a customer costs you today, whether that is ads, your own time on calls or a salaried rep. If ads already cost you a quarter of first-year revenue, then a twenty percent commission that only pays out on a closed deal is a better deal than your ads. It is not a worse one. Commission-only sales doesn't make a customer free. It makes the cost of a customer variable and tied to results, and that is a very different thing when cash is tight. The floor is set by the closer. A closer has to earn enough per hour of calls to make your offer worth the time, compared with the other offers the closer could take instead. If one sale pays fifty dollars and each sale takes five calls, the maths doesn't work for anyone serious, and you will only get people who haven't done the maths yet. I go through that calculation from the closer's side in how to evaluate a commission-only offer.

What the market usually pays

For high-ticket, one-off deals the commission is usually a percentage of cash collected. Public job posts for closers on coaching and consulting offers often sit between about 7.5% and 17.5%, and ten percent is probably the most common number of all. Closers on hard sales ask for more, and so do closers who find their own leads. A guide that pulls rates from real job posts (like this overview of high-ticket commission rates) is a good check before you publish a number. Recurring products work differently. A monthly plan pays out over time, so the closer usually gets a share of each payment for a period, often somewhere between fifteen and thirty percent of the recurring revenue for the first year, and sometimes for the whole life of the customer. The monthly slice looks small. But it adds up, and it has one very useful side effect, which is that it ties the closer to the customer staying, because a customer who cancels in month two stops paying the closer too. I compare the two motions in high-ticket vs MRR.

Adjust for who finds the leads

The biggest single adjustment is who finds the leads. If you hand the closer warm leads from your own marketing, pay toward the lower end of the range, because you have already done a large part of the work. If the closer finds the leads and brings the pipeline with them, pay toward the higher end (the closer is doing marketing and closing at the same time). A setter in the middle changes things again, and setter versus closer shows how teams usually split the money.

Deal size matters too. With a very large ticket a slightly lower percentage still pays well, so you can often go down a point or two without losing anyone. And small tickets work the other way round.

A worked example

Say you sell a B2B tool at $400 a month and a typical customer stays about eighteen months. You spend around $1,500 in ads and founder time to win each customer today. A closer paid 25% of the first twelve months would earn $1,200 per customer, paid month by month as the customer pays. That is below what a customer costs you today, it only costs you anything when a customer actually signs, and $1,200 per sale is a number a good closer will take seriously. If the same closer also had to find the leads, you could go to 30% and still come out ahead. Now take a $29 monthly plan on the same terms. The closer would earn $87 per customer, which is simply not enough for a phone call. At that price I would look at self-serve onboarding, or a setter booking very short demos, and not at a closer.

Make the number public and simple

Closers compare offers side by side, often in the same evening. A clear percentage, a stated deal size and an honest number of leads will beat a vague "generous commission" almost every time. Write down exactly what the percentage applies to and when it is paid, and put it in the agreement as a worked example with real numbers.

Bounty-Flow shows the percentage on each offer before anyone applies, and the rate is frozen once a closer is accepted, so nobody can quietly change it later. My own rule is simple. The best commission rate is the highest one your margin can carry, because a closer who earns well sells harder for you than a closer who feels short-changed, and the closer who feels short-changed is usually gone within a month anyway.