Start Your Learning Journey

Sales Comp’23 is the premier conference for sales compensation and operations professionals who want to create and unleash powerful rewards strategies that drive spectacular sales success.   

 

This conference is designed for you to customize your schedule based on your individual learning and connecting preferences.

12:30PM
Registration & Badge Pick-Up
1:00PM
CSCP Exam Prep Class
David Cichelli Revenue Growth Advisor, The Alexander Group, Inc.

Join sales comp expert David Cichelli to prep for the exam held Monday, August 21. Review the body of knowledge, ask questions, and get exam prep pointers. Register for the Sales Comp’23 and the Certified Sales Compensation Professional exam to access this complimentary Course. 

For more preparation with in-depth coverage of materials needed to aid in successfully obtaining your CSCP certification, consider WorldatWork’s April or August Sales Compensation Course Series.

*Please note: To attend/register for the prep class, you must be registered for the CSCP onsite exam.

7:00AM
Registration & Badge Pick-Up
7:30AM
CSCP Exam

This three-hour exam covers everything relating to incentive compensation – from total cash compensation to sales compensation design. Included with your exam fee is the Certified Sales Compensation Professional Exam Prep Course, held August 21. Exam results will be available immediately.  

For a more preparation and an in depth coverage of materials needed to aid in successfully obtaining your CSCP certification, consider WorldatWork’s April or August Sales Compensation Course Series.

Purchase your Certified Sales Compensation Professional Exam on the WorldatWork website.

8:30AM
Briefings & Bagels
11:00AM
Opening Keynote Session
12:15PM
Lunch in the Connection Zone
1:30PM
Amey Deorukhkar Manager, ZS Associates
Chad Albrecht Partner, ZS Associates
Sales Compensation
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Understand key considerations when evaluating roles for short-term incentive pay eligibility.
• Examine the alternatives to short-term incentives with the where andwhen to apply them.
• Weigh the downsides of leveraging short-term incentives for the wrong roles and situations.

Short-term incentives can be powerful tools for motivating and rewarding people in your organization. However, not everyone should be eligible for them—and not everyone wants to be! Join this session to learn optimal criteria for determining effective incentives for employees in various roles and situations. Go beyond the basics  of “customer facing or not” to make better decisions around incentives eligibility for your organization!

1:30pm-2:30pm
John Waldron Total Rewards Director, PepsiCo
Sales Operations
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Learn the basic components of SPM and PepsiCo’s insights forsuccessful implementations.
• Apply best practices and learnings within your own SPM implementation or as an enhancement to current SPM implementation.
• Analyze and understand SPM implementations and how the best practices presented can create greater value and benefits.

Sales performance management (SPM) is not for the faint of heart.  It’s one of the most complex system implementations, requiring alignment of disparate data sources from Sales, HR and Finance to conduct calculations at 99.9% accuracy.  In this session, you’ll learn from key experiences gleaned over more than a decade by leaders at the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo. You’ll leave empowered to replicate PepsiCo’s success, while avoiding mistakes that often cause delays or implementation failure.

1:30pm-2:30pm
2:30PM
Break in the Connection Zone
3:00PM
Keith Briscoe Vice President, Global Sales Compensation, Dell Technologies
Joao Samoza Director, Sales Compensation Design, Dell Technologies
Sales Operations
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Understand how Dell managed their costs while retaining top sales talent.
• Demonstrate an effective compensation framework.
• Apply your sales compensation and operations knowledge to share and gain insights on selecting and managing key performance indicators.

If your organization has ever overspent on sales commissions or underperformed on quotas, this session is for you. Learn how sales compensation leaders at Dell addressed their sales issues by improving their compensation operations and analytics, creating shared responsibilities and developing integrated quota management that combined artificial intelligence and human expertise. Participants can share their own experiences through an interactive discussion, and you’ll walk away with new solution options for your unique challenges.

3:00pm-4:00pm
Mark Donnolo CEO and Managing Partner, SalesGlobe
Sales Compensation
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Shift from “fact-knower” to “logic-driven problem-solver.”
• Examine a question-based approach to addressing sales compensation and quota issues.
• Validate and refine your organization’s problem-statement around sales compensation.

Knowing the facts about sales comp is not the same as understanding how to apply the right methodology for solving specific problems. To become truly impactful in your role, you must be able to do both skillfully. In this engaging session, you’ll gain access to a robust toolkit of methodologies and learn to apply problem-solving logic and analytics that will take you to the next level of sales comp success. You’ll come away knowing how to diagnose problems and create logic-driven solutions for success.

3:00pm-4:00pm
4:00PM
Networking Event
7:30AM
Registration & Badge Pick-Up
8:30AM
Scott Sands Senior Partner, Simon-Kucher
Coffee & Comp Chat
Sales Compensation
Advanced: Applied Theory and Strategy
• Understand the chemical changes that salespeople experienced while working remotely after the pandemic.
• Identify issues which may affect engagement and performance due to changes in job responsibilities or incentive effectiveness.
• Design improved sales incentive plans that account for what we’ve learned about human behavior and reward motivation in the last five years.

The human body has its own system for providing “Rewards,” namely in the form of releasing the chemical dopamine to create satisfaction after we achieve something. Many salespeople get a dose of it from connecting with customers or receiving commission checks. But researchers at the National Institutes of Health recently concluded that the pandemic rewired people’s brains to respond to rewards differently. Engage in this fascinating discussion about how we might change sales incentive to adapt to this new reality.

8:30am-9:15am
Christopher Goff Associate Director, Sales Compensation, Labcorp
Coffee & Comp Chat
Sales Compensation
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Learn where to look for unintentional, structural and perceived inequities in your compensation program.
• Understand how to formulate changes that will reduce risk and bias across your sales compensation programs and processes.
• Utilize an evaluation checklist to appraise your current program for fairness.

Whether overt or unconscious, our biases can have real effects that damage employees’ morale, spur inequities and introduce legal risks. Join the discussion and get tools you need to ensure your sales-comp program is designed fairly. In this interactive session, you’ll appraise your program across the aspects of target setting, territorial opportunity, plan design, pay practices, job documentation and governance. You’ll be thinking through your assessment during the session and engage with other participants to help each other learn from experiences shared. 

8:30am-9:15am
David Johnston President, Sales Resource Group Inc.
Coffee & Comp Chat
Sales Analytics
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Understand the return on investment that can be achieved through regularly auditing your sales compensation plan.
• Identify criteria for designing the audit checklist and learn why it’s important to have one
• Determine prerequisites for auditing your SCP.

Regularly reviewing your sales compensation plan (SCP) can improve performance, deliver better sales results and drive desirable sales behaviors. Join us for a hands-on session about how to perform an effective SCP audit, including assessing the link between sales performance and payout. Through real-time polling and audience engagement the presenter will guide assessing criteria you can use to drive better results for your organization. You won’t get this kind of on-the-spot analysis anywhere else!  

8:30am-9:15am
9:30AM
Ron Burke Senior Director, WTW
Claire Gorick Director, Work & Rewards, WTW
Katherine Kiesel Associate Director, Work and Rewards, WTW
Sales Compensation
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Understand which risks you need to prepare for and theprotection mechanisms you can build into sales-incentive plan designs.
• Analyze historical patterns of performance and interpret this as an input to designing smart sales incentive plan mechanics, parameters and rules of engagement.
• Evaluate and implement the right mix of sales-incentive design features to fit with the specific roles, processes and environments within which you operate.

You’ve meticulously mapped out your sales strategies, set your goals and developed a precise sales-comp formula to drive outcomes. What could go wrong? In one word, everything. Sales compensation is unpredictable because sales are unpredictable—because the world is unpredictable. While we can’t prevent supply chain issues, a pandemic or global financial crises, we can adopt a smart, flexible mindset to mitigate the risks they create. Everyone will benefit from this interactive, insightful session about how to “future-proof” your sales strategy for success.  

9:30am-10:30am
Donya Rose Managing Principal, The Cygnal Group
Rick Butler Vice President, Global Sales Compensation, ServiceNow
Interactive Panel
Sales Compensation
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Understand what consumption-based pricing is, who is shifting to it and why it makes sales incentives harder.
• Assess options to motivate and focus sellers in consumption-only and in blended models.
• Examine what has worked best from the perspective of sales comp leaders.

Consumption-based pricing, which allows customers to pay only for what they use, is on the rise in many sectors. Under this model, a contract is a commitment to a rate, possibly with minimum volumes. But you can’t discern what was “sold” until usage scales—or doesn’t. So how do you decide when salespeople get paid, and for what? In this participative session, consultant and practitioner facilitators will share their experiences and engage the audience about what currently works, what doesn’t work and possibly uncover new paths forward. Join the conversation and leave invigorated with innovative ideas!

9:30am-10:30am
10:45AM
Elliot Scott Owner, Elliot Scott Consulting LLC
Sales Compensation
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Understand how to build a quota allocation model that incorporates market potential data.
• Assess the fairness and accuracy of the model using historical data before using it to set quotas for the coming period.
• Construct models to improve accuracy and fairness.

Accurate quotas are important tools for maintaining the integrity of your sales compensation plans. But to be effective, they must also be fair. That means setting lower quotas for territories with less sales potential, for example. This practical session will show you how to incorporate third-party data to create quotas that are equitable  and credible. You’ll learn to use historical data to test your model and adjust the parameters before setting quotas.

10:45am-11:45am
David Cichelli Revenue Growth Advisor, The Alexander Group, Inc.
Sales Compensation
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Confirm instances where sales compensation drives sales behaviors.
• Describe the limits of sales compensation.
• Explain how sales comp fits into your sales performance platform.

If you believe the stereotype that all salespeople are “coin operated,” your sales performance strategy may be falling short. While compensation sometimes improves productivity, in other instances the answer calls for additional tools. In this session, you’ll learn a more nuanced—and effective—approach to managing your sales performance platform, along with tips for educating stakeholders on the optimal application of sales compensation. You’ll leave with a better sense of how to approach this complex issue in your own organization.

10:45am-11:45am
Paul Reiman Founder and Managing Partner, Novo Insights
Bryan Briscoe VP, Global Compensation, Marriott International, Inc.
Sales Analytics
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Understand the key features of business data visualization.
• Analyze practical examples from the sales compensation world.
• Transform your visual communications by engaging in an “edutaining” learning experience.

You've got the software. You’ve got the sales analytics. You’ve even got some snazzy visuals. But you may be missing one critical thing: impact! Too often, our data analysis fails to adequately convey a problem or highlight a solution. It’s time to put your data to work for you! Join us in this practical session, where you’ll learn how to  create data visualizations that drive decision-making and elevate outcomes for optimal impact.

10:45am-11:45am
11:45AM
Lunch in the Connection Zone
1:15PM
Joel Shapiro Professor of Data and Analytics, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Managment
Sales Analytics
Entry: Awareness with Limited Experience
• Understand how analytics can be used to drive sales.
• Familiarize with the concepts of predictive analytics and artificial intelligence.
• Formulate ways to embed prediction into your important sales compensation decisions.

To succeed with analytics, you don’t need technical knowledge so much as you need to understand how to ask the right questions. With fun stories, examples and a well-told joke or two, these presenters provide the framework you need to solve important problems using data analytics and artificial intelligence. You’ll learn the value of an “evidence-driven” approach and how to apply predictive analytics to make better sales decisions. 

1:15pm-2:15pm
Marc Wallace Senior Client Partner, Korn Ferry
Sales Compensation
Advanced: Applied Theory and Strategy
• Understand concepts of fast incentives, associated commercial impact, and the downsides of conventional design.
• Implement your own fast incentive approach to rewards design.
• Examine and address the barriers and challenges of implementation.

The workplace is changing at lightning speed, but sales incentives haven’t kept pace. Most organizations overengineer their incentive design, leading to costly approaches that don’t align pay and performance. Join us to learn about the “fast incentives” many sales leaders are implementing to create more agile links between performance and rewards. This session will cover the shortfalls of traditional compensation design and highlight a better—and quicker—solution, so you can hit the ground running when you return to work.

1:15pm-2:15pm
2:30PM
Molly Ahearne PhD Student, University of Georgia
Mohsen Pourmasoudi Assistant Professor of Marketing, San Diego State University
Sales Compensation
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Recognize the disparities between men and women in sales.
• Identify how female salespeople respond to these disparities in terms of performance and likelihood of organizational turnover.
• Understand the long-term ramifications of gender gaps for sales organizations.

On average, women workers earn less than men—a pay gap that persists across most industries. Yet little is known about equity in sales, despite rising awareness of its importance. Take steps towards fostering a fairer salesforce by learning about research that examines gender disparities in representation and earnings.. Delve into a dataset with more than 90,000 salespeople across 228 firms from 39 countries and 16 industries. You’ll come away knowing more about the ramifications of these gaps—and how to close them.

2:30pm-3:30pm
Joseph Krsul Partner, Sales Force Effectiveness Practice Leader, Aon
Joshua Ross Partner, Aon
Brian Keating Associate Partner, Aon
Sales Compensation
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Summarize the standard practices around leaves of absences.
• Determine areas where your current plan may not best support sales people on leave.
• Apply potential solutions when leave of absence considerations arise.

Companies are offering longer caregiving leave—including maternity and paternity leave—than they did in the past, and more employees are using it.It’s critical for sales comp professionals to understand how to account for these leaves of absence (LOAs) in their sales compensation plans. Join this session led by Aon for an up-to-date overview of best practices along with insights from a recent survey assessing how 500 companies structured their programs to incorporate LOAs.

2:30pm-3:30pm
3:30PM
Happy Hour & Business Exchange in the Connection Zone
7:30AM
Registration & Badge Pick-Up
8:00AM
Breakfast
8:30AM
Robert Blohm Senior Partner, OpenSymmetry
Mark Briggs Senior Manager, Compensation, Waste Management
Joe Owen Senior Director, Sales Compensation & Analysis, Cox Communications
Patrick Mulkey Director of Sales, Gordon Food Service
Interactive Panel
Sales Compensation
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Understand how to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of your SPM solution.
• Assess new ideas and concepts to enhance your SPM solution.
• Explore SPM and use cases to help you quickly deliver impact in your organization.

Only about 50% of companies report that ROI goals are met by Sales Performance Management (SPM) solutions. Do you have an effective strategy to ensure return on your SPM investment? Join this panel of successful practitioners who have realized true SPM value. Together, we’ll explore internal resource management, deployment strategies, testing and solution rollout, implementation best practices and post-deployment efforts to drive enhanced SPM value and ROI. Ask questions, gain insights and receive a full copy of our 2023 SPM research report. 

8:30am-9:30am
Robert Lemke Director - Human Capital Services, Grant Thornton
Debate
Sales Compensation
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Differentiate the value proposition your organization uses to compete for salespeople.
• Examine how sales analytics can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of your current reward structure.
• Apply a consumer-based statistical method to evaluate sellers’ sensitivity to changes in reward structure.

Debate the advantages of adopting a seller-centered approach to reward program evaluation as a unique method to rethink traditions that are no longer effective. By understanding how people make trade-offs we can identify ‘optimal’ rewards – a plan that delivers more value to the seller while cost neutral to the company. Facilitators will engage a mock working session to explore what sellers need under the new way of working and reimagine how sellers can be rewarded.

8:30am-9:30am
9:45AM
Tim Gardner Associate Professor of Management, Utah State University
Colin Wong Head of Banking and Financial Services Practice, Blue Horizons Group
Sales Compensation
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Understand the ubiquity of sales incentive gaming.
• Adapt to thinking like an incentive gamer.
• Apply a comprehensive typology of incentive gaming to prevent and fix problems with gaming the sales incentive plan.

We’ve all encountered salespeople who game the incentive system: they find loopholes to boost their own pay while undermining their employer’s goals. In this interesting and practical session, you’ll learn to think like a gamer so you can anticipate their moves—and beat them at their own game. The presenters will provide an overview of gaming tactics derived from interviews with 40 leaders in sales and sales ops. You’ll get tips for spotting and fixing holes in your own plan. Game over!

9:45am-10:45am
Michael Vaccaro Lead Principal, Vaccaro Sales Compensation and Effectiveness Consulting
Nate Parenti Director - FCC Sales & Service Incentive Compensation, Wolters Kluwer
Sales Compensation
Intermediate: Hands-on and Practical Application
• Understand the basic compensation design principles behind SPIFFs and MBOs.
• Apply SPIFF and MBOs in a real-world situation.
• Analyze the designs used in this case study and other strategic applications for SPIFF/MBO designs.

Standard commission and bonus-comp designs are not always effective at supporting the complex market strategies that sales teams are asked to drive. In this session, you’ll hear about a clever approach used by the Dutch information services company Wolters Kluwer, which integrated the design of immediate, short-term bonuses (or SPIFFs) with carefully crafted MBO (management by objective) goals to increase sales performance. You’ll get tips and tricks for focusing your sales team along with creative ideas for SPIFF/MBO applications.

9:45am-10:45am
11:00AM
Closing Keynote Session