Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

The 20X quota rule everyone argued about

22 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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1:29

In this segment, Jason Lemkin defends a controversial "20x quota" compensation rule he introduced for his sales team. He explains that a $100K base salary is tied to a $2 million annual revenue quota, with uncapped commissions that effectively double the on‑target earnings (OTE) to $200K. The rule was derived from two sources: Lemkin’s own nine‑month experience as a solo seller, which informed how much an individual can realistically sell, and a desire to make the model fair in a rapidly evolving market that uses a land‑and‑expand go‑to‑market strategy. To incentivize hunting new logos and expanding existing accounts, he proposes double compensation for new‑logo hunting and extended commission periods (12–24+ months) for expansions. He notes the strong reactions—some accusing him of overworking salespeople, others eager to adopt the model—and recounts telling his first two hires about the 20x quota after nine months of operation.

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I can say like the 20x quota, that rule was very controversial. And I got like people like online messaging me being like, you're slaving people for asking them to bring 20x. Some people like messaged me being like, where do I sign up? It was very controversial, but also like it generated the right debate out there, right? So the entire logic was very simple. It's like, look, if you want to have a base salary of $100K, You're gonna need to bring $2 million in revenues every single year, right? You have uncapped commissions. It's like OTE out of the gate is gonna be $200K because we will double like the base salary and all of that stuff, right? But there were 2 main items that came for this. Number one is I was actually, it was based on my experience selling as a single seller for the company for 9 months. It's like, how much can you actually sell as an individual? How can we extrapolate that? Right. Number 2 was based on, we need to make it fair. Like the market is evolving very quickly. We have a land and expand model. We want you to go hunting new logos and wanna have like a customer success team that like actually goes and expands those logos. And for those 2, I will actually double compensate people because I do believe that if I'm incentivizing to go hunt deals, then I wanna give you commissions for that deal expansion for at least 12 months and in some cases 24 months or longer. Right. And what we found out is when I hired the first 2 people, 9 months in, I told them like, this is gonna be 20x quota, right?