A commission plan designed for field sales, applied to a portfolio of strategic accounts : that is the most common mistake, and the most expensive. It produces an account manager chasing volume instead of building the relationship, quarters at zero variable pay while nothing is actually going wrong, and departures at eighteen months. Variable pay for a Key Account Manager follows a different logic, and in Belgium it rests on specific mechanisms worth knowing before the contract is drafted.
In short
- On a long cycle, monthly commission on signed revenue makes no sense : you need an annualised variable built on intermediate milestones.
- Belgium offers three distinct routes : the classic individual bonus, the collective CBA no. 90 bonus with lighter social treatment, and stock option or warrant plans.
- The CBA no. 90 bonus is capped at €4,255 gross per employee per calendar year in 2026, and it cannot be based on individual performance.
- The sales representative statute creates commission entitlements after the contract ends : design for it, rather than discovering it when the employee leaves.
- A variable plan is revised once a year, in writing ; changing it unilaterally mid-course exposes the employer.
Why “commission on revenue” fails on key accounts
A commission plan rewards an act : the signature. It works well when that act is frequent, individual and attributable. On a strategic account, none of those three conditions holds. The signature comes once every twelve to twenty-four months, it results from collective work involving pre-sales, legal and sometimes general management, and its size depends on trade-offs the account owner does not control.
Three perverse effects follow. The salesperson favours quick deals over the structuring account. They negotiate discounts to trigger the signature inside their own financial year, which damages margin. And they go through long periods without variable pay, which makes them receptive to approaches. A key account profile who leaves takes with them a client relationship built over years : the cost of that departure far exceeds whatever was saved on the pay plan.
The practical conclusion : key account variable pay is designed as an instrument for steering the relationship, not as a volume premium. What you measure has to reflect how the account progresses, not only the moment it signs.
The three mechanisms available under Belgian law
Contrary to a widespread assumption, there is not one “bonus” in Belgium but several regimes, with different social and tax treatment. Combining them intelligently is what separates a well-built package from an expensive and unreadable one.
| Mechanism | Trigger | What it allows | Main limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Individual bonus or commission | Personal objectives, revenue, margin, milestones | Fine-grained steering of individual performance | Treated as salary : full contributions |
| CBA no. 90 salary bonus | Collective, uncertain and measurable objectives | Lighter social and tax treatment | Capped and prohibited on individual performance |
| Stock options or warrants | Award of financial instruments | Alignment on company value | Specific tax regime, applied at grant |
The individual bonus : flexible but expensive
This is the simplest and most widely used mechanism. It allows objectives specific to the account owner, including qualitative ones : mapping the decision-makers, renewing a framework agreement, opening a new division at an existing client. Its drawback is fiscal : it is treated as ordinary remuneration.
The CBA no. 90 bonus : advantageous but collective
The non-recurring result-linked benefit, commonly called the CBA no. 90 bonus, enjoys markedly more favourable social and tax treatment. According to the Federal Public Service Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue, the 2026 ceiling is €4,255 gross per employee per calendar year for social security purposes, of which €3,701 is exempt from income tax. The employee bears a 13.07 % solidarity contribution and the employer a special 33 % contribution.
The constraint is structural : objectives must be collective, measurable, verifiable and manifestly uncertain when the plan is introduced. They cannot relate to an individual employee’s performance. A plan built on a sales team’s revenue or on a client retention rate qualifies ; a plan built on the key account manager’s personal quota does not. Filing is done online where there is no trade union delegation, and paper filing disappears from 1 June 2026.
Options and warrants : aligning on value
The third route is rarer on a key account role than on a leadership role, but relevant in fast-growing companies. The Belgian stock option regime is specific : taxation applies at grant, not at sale. We set out this mechanism and its conditions in our article on structuring equity for a Head of Sales, where it plays a central role.
The expert’s view
We’re specialists : Sales, Marketing, Management. Not generalists. When a generalist agency recruits a Sales Director, they read the CV. We know the actual job – the real trade-offs between prospecting and farming, what it means to lead a distributed trilingual team across the Benelux, how to build a commercial strategy that holds in complex B2B. That field-level understanding is what separates a placement that lasts from one that breaks at 18 months.
What to index the variable on
The question is not “how much” but “on what”. Four families of indicators combine usefully on a key account role.
- Margin, not revenue. Indexing on turnover encourages discounting. Indexing on the account’s gross margin aligns the salesperson with real profitability.
- Account progression. Share of wallet, number of client divisions or countries addressed, upward movement in the product range : these are the indicators that separate active management from simple renewal.
- Cycle milestones. On an eighteen-month cycle, validating a specification, clearing an investment committee or making a shortlist are objectifiable steps that deserve to be rewarded.
- Retention and renewal. A framework agreement renewed on improved terms is often worth more than a new logo. The plan has to acknowledge that.
A readability rule beats an exhaustive one : beyond four criteria, a plan becomes unmanageable and the salesperson stops reasoning in terms of it. If you need seven indicators to describe what you expect, the mandate itself is probably not clear.
Belgian legal pitfalls worth knowing
The sales representative statute
When an employee prospects and negotiates business with customers on the employer’s behalf, they fall under the particular regime for sales representatives set out in the Act of 3 July 1978. That regime governs the right to commission on orders obtained before the contract ends but accepted afterwards, on orders placed in the months following termination where the representative can show prior contact, and it grants under conditions a right to a goodwill indemnity. The Federal Public Service Employment publishes the exact terms.
The practical consequence : the variable plan must state explicitly what happens on exit. Many companies discover the question during the notice period, in a context that has already turned adversarial. Dealing with it when drafting the contract costs an hour of work ; dealing with it afterwards costs a dispute.
Unilateral modification of the plan
A variable pay plan applied over time becomes part of the working conditions. Reducing it unilaterally exposes the employer, particularly where variable pay represents a substantial share of the package. Good practice is to provide from the outset for an annual plan, revised on a fixed date, with a written framework signed each year. This protects both parties and avoids permanent renegotiation.
The unreachable target
A target nobody reaches two years running is no longer a target, it is a signal. It demotivates the incumbent, undermines management credibility, and ends up in court when the variable was presented as “realistic” at hiring. We say this to clients during the brief : if the figure quoted to the candidate has never been achieved by anyone in the company, it should not appear in the offer.
What the pay plan tells the candidate
A senior salesperson reads a compensation plan as a strategic document. They see what the company measures, therefore what it values, therefore how it will be run. A plan indexed exclusively on signed revenue announces a culture of quarterly pressure. A plan that recognises margin, renewal and account progression announces a company that thinks in years.
That is why we systematically ask for the variable plan before starting a search. It is part of the brief in the same way as the job description, and it determines how credible our approach will be with the profiles we target. A candidate who has already lived through an unreadable plan will ask about it in the second interview, and a vague answer is enough to lose them.
The same requirement connects to a broader question : what actually separates an account manager from a deal hunter. We covered it in our comparison of Key Account Manager and Business Developer, where the two roles turn out to need two different pay philosophies as much as two different personalities.
Who arbitrates, and when?
Plan governance matters as much as the formula. Three questions should be settled before the first financial year. Who validates the objectives, and on what quantified basis? Who decides the edge cases – an account transferred mid-year, an order cancelled after invoicing, a client taken over by a foreign purchasing centre? And on what date is the calculation communicated to the employee?
On that last point, Belgian law already imposes a useful discipline on sales representatives : the employer provides a monthly statement of commissions due for the previous month, and payment follows within days of that statement unless the contract provides otherwise. Extending that logic of periodic statements to the whole variable plan, even outside the statute, removes half of the tensions observed at year end.
One last reflex, often forgotten : document arbitration decisions. A company that has twice settled a transferred-account case the same way has created its own internal precedent. Writing it down in three lines avoids having to reconstruct it from memory three years later, when the person who decided has gone. It is the kind of discipline we look at during a commercial team assessment, because it says a great deal about the maturity of the management system.
The case for a longer horizon
One question comes up whenever the cycle exceeds a financial year : should part of the variable be deferred? A multi-year component – paid over two or three years, tied to the account’s sustained profitability rather than a single signature – aligns the account manager with the outcome the company actually wants. It also discourages the end-of-year discount used to pull a deal into the current period.
The counter-argument is real : deferred pay only motivates people who intend to stay, and it is worth nothing to a candidate who has already been through two reorganisations. In practice, a deferred component works when the company can point to a track record of paying it. Where there is no such history, an annual plan with clear milestones is more credible than a sophisticated long-term scheme nobody believes in.
Building a plan that lasts three years
A good key account variable plan has five characteristics. It is annualised, with advances or milestones to smooth the employee’s cash flow. It combines a collective base, possibly housed in a CBA no. 90 bonus, with an individual share on qualitative criteria. It rests on margin rather than volume. It explicitly covers exit situations. And it is revised once a year, on a known date, in writing.
The rest is case by case, and depends above all on how the management committee actually operates. A plan that is perfect on paper but arbitrated discretionarily every year produces exactly the same effects as a bad plan. Consistency between what is written and what is practised matters more than the sophistication of the mechanism.
Before drafting an offer, one question remains : the overall level of the package this variable sits inside. We address it in our article on the salary of a senior Key Account Manager in Belgium, which details the seven lines of a Belgian package and the factors that move the range.
