You are Diana Cabezas-Pacheco, 38, Sales Director at Pampero Moda S.A. de C.V., a mid-tier fast-fashion retailer running 95 stores across Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. It is March 2026. Your CFO has just walked into your office holding a forensic report. The commission scheme you inherited — and have tightened twice in five years — is being systematically gamed. The bleed is roughly €2.3M a year. You have three months to put a new design on the board's desk.
The situation
Pampero Moda closed 2025 at €140M revenue and 12% EBITDA (≈ €16.8M). The chain employs 230 salespeople on the floor, 25 store supervisors, and 10 regional managers. The commission scheme is the one you inherited when you took the seat in 2021 and the one your predecessor inherited from her predecessor: variable pay is a flat percentage of euros sold, settled monthly, paid the 10th of the following month. Clean, fast, defensible. The board has liked it for a decade.
The problem your CFO put on the desk on Monday morning is that the scheme is being gamed, and not by a handful of bad actors — by the entire commercial organisation, systematically, across all three countries. The forensic team coded four distinct gaming patterns from POS data, returns logs, and an anonymous survey of 47 floor staff. Each pattern is rational behaviour from the salesperson's point of view. Each pattern is corrosive from yours. Together they cost the chain margin, payroll, and customer goodwill — and you can put a number on each of those.
You have three months and three live options on the table: a tighter audit regime on the existing scheme, a switch to margin-based commission, or a full multi-KPI dashboard that pays on a composite of sales, NPS, inventory turn, and returns. Each option costs something different, recovers a different slice of the bleed, and carries a different risk that the salespeople will simply find a new way to game the new metric. The CEO has read Goodhart's law on Wikipedia over the weekend and is, in her words, "looking forward to seeing how you avoid proving him right twice."