For most organizations, sales compensation plans were historically “set it and forget it” documents. Design the plan at the beginning of the year, get it approved, and implement it through the fiscal year. But in a revenue environment where markets change quickly, product priorities shift and customer buying patterns evolve, that approach simply doesn’t work
Sales compensation plans get designed once per year, talked about at kickoff, and are mostly forgotten until next year’s planning cycle. But revenue organizations don’t operate on an annual cycle. Prices change. New products launch. Customers shift. Territories get aligned and dismissed. Within weeks, sales teams will gameplan how to maximize their payouts. If nobody
Sales compensation used to be a payout system administered by Sales Operations or a budget managed by Finance. As companies evolve their compensation from transactional systems into revenue intelligence platforms, an important question emerges: Who owns incentive strategy? When defining ownership in the age of revenue intelligence isn’t clear, it’s no longer an operational annoyance
Exceptions as a normal part of business: That’s how compensation is treated in many organizations. “The deal’s strategic, we need to make an exception.” “It was a big discount, I don’t want my team member penalized.” “Multiple people pitched in on this opportunity, I want to split the credit.” While these ad hoc decisions may
