Unlock Proven Comp Strategies
Walk away with actionable tactics to motivate performance, control costs, and align incentives with results.
Gain Tools to Improve Plans
Learn how to spot weaknesses, modernize outdated structures, and apply today’s most effective compensation models.
Expand Your Leadership Network
Connect with peers and experts to exchange ideas, share challenges and strengthen your collaboration with comp teams.
Join Erin Mayer, a litigation attorney with expertise in defending (and preventing) lawsuits filed by sales employees for a session designed to help you understand common pitfalls in sales compensation practices.
Erin will highlight actions that many sales organizations believe protect them but, in reality, may increase their risk of legal action. They will provide high-level insights into how to avoid these mistakes and keep your sales compensation plans legally sound.
Key Takeaways
- Learn why a written, enforceable sales compensation agreement is essential for protecting your organization.
- Identify the top 8 legal red flags when creating or implementing sales comp plans.
- Gain practical tips for drafting, reviewing, and communicating plan terms to stay compliant and avoid disputes.
Traditionally, sales compensation plans are reviewed and updated on an annual basis. However, the rapid pace of change in customer markets and product availability—driven by factors such as public policy shifts, tariffs, cultural dynamics, talent availability, and economic fluctuations—demands a more agile approach. Leadership must be prepared to respond to requests for updates not only within the current plan cycle but also for future periods.
This session will feature insights from experienced sales compensation leaders on the critical importance of establishing a widely understood governance policy. Such a policy serves as a guiding framework to navigate the evolving business landscape, ensuring that sales incentive plan design and execution remain effective. Gain actionable strategies and real-world examples on how to adapt your sales compensation plan to thrive amidst continuous change.
Key Takeaways
- Understand three key reasons governance is critical for timely adjustments to a sales compensation plan
- Learn guiding principles for writing a governance policy for sales compensation
- Identify the primary sections to include in a Sales Governance Policy
SPIFs—Good or Bad? This session explores the pros and cons of short-term sales incentives and introduces an innovative tool: the SPIF Success Scorecard. We’ll draw parallels between SPIFs and everyday incentives like flash sales and loss leaders, highlighting how these tactics can drive short-term gains but also come with risks such as overpayment and misaligned focus.
At the heart of the discussion is the SPIF Success Scorecard—a five-dimensional framework designed to evaluate SPIF effectiveness across five key metrics: short-term impact, focus, self-funding/positive ROI, rarity, and simplicity and clarity.
This tool helps organizations model the desired outcomes, set appropriate incentive rates, and ensure SPIFs deliver measurable, cost-effective benefits without diverting attention from core sales activities.
By showcasing this tool, the session offers a strategic approach to designing SPIFs that work, ensuring they maximize value while minimizing potential pitfalls.
Key Takeaways
- Learn how to use the SPIF Success Scorecard to evaluate effectiveness and align incentives with strategic goals.
- Design purposeful, measurable SPIFs by focusing on outcomes, ROI, and sales alignment.
- Avoid SPIF fatigue with smart structures and targeted use to maximize impact and minimize waste.
We all have beliefs, rules of thumb, and benchmarks about pay mix. For example, reps with short cycles tend to have more aggressive pay mixes to motivate them to sell more. Right?
Maybe not.
In this session, we’ll explore the critical distinction between pay mix and actual at-risk pay. You’ll learn how to analyze your own plan designs and identify opportunities to drive better alignment with your sales roles, ensuring more effective compensation strategies.
Key Takeaways
- Challenge conventional rules of thumb about pay mix
- Analyze your actual at-risk pay and compare it to your designed pay mix
- Gain practical strategies to improve alignment between sales roles and at-risk pay
For those who exceed quota, accelerated payouts seem like a straightforward incentive. But is it really that simple? How much acceleration should you offer? How many accelerators should be included in the payout curve? Are there conditions to prevent costs from spiraling out of control? And is there ever a case for deceleration? Does the answer change between monthly vs. annual plans?
There are clear, evidence-based answers to all of these questions—rooted in the behavioral principles that drive sales motivation, combined with practical cost management strategies for compensation.
In this session, we’ll take a step-by-step approach to determining which metrics should have accelerators, where to place them on the payout curve, how fast to accelerate, and how to assess whether adjustments are needed for next year.
Bring your ideas, tough questions, and unresolved internal debates about acceleration. Together, we’ll dive into this essential sales compensation topic, and everyone will walk away with new insights and experience.
Key Takeaways
- Learn how to identify the performance range for a specific measure and align it with sales goals.
- Understand how pay mix interacts with acceleration to drive desired sales outcomes.
- Explore the ideal payout curve shapes for effectively communicating and motivating your sales team.
Sales compensation systems are excellent at tracking and forecasting results, but they often fall short in providing the performance management processes needed to maximize productivity. As revenue targets outpace organizational budgets, sales teams are increasingly tasked with doing more with less.
This panel will explore how leading organizations are implementing efficient and effective performance management processes to close this gap, ensuring that sales compensation strategies directly drive revenue growth. Panelists will share actionable insights on aligning data, tools, and methodologies to foster a culture of accountability and success, even in resource-constrained environments.
Key Takeaways
- Learn the value panel participants have gained from their Performance Management Programs
- Discover how to implement similar programs within your organization (take-home handout)
- Explore thought starters on enhancing sales compensation/performance programs and the role of practitioner teams
Join us for an insightful discussion with Trent Akagi, VP of Sales Compensation and Readiness at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. With 28 years of experience, Trent has played a key role in shaping HPE’s compensation programs. His expertise lies in harnessing sales compensation as a strategic tool to tackle business challenges, spotlight key priorities, and drive both change and growth.
Trent has implemented innovative changes, including adjusting sales crediting rules to foster a strong sales culture, revising measures and weights to emphasize high-priority recurring revenue, and introducing a mega deal program to manage payouts for significant, binary deals. He will also share insights into how HPE executed these transformations and the lessons learned along the way.
Moderated by Rachel Parrinello, Sales Compensation Solutions Lead at the Alexander Group, this session will highlight how HPE’s practices align with central market trends and guiding principles. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights into effective sales compensation strategies.
Key Takeaways
- Understand how sales crediting influences seller behaviors
- Learn how to use measures and mechanics to drive strategic behaviors
- Explore strategies for handling mega deals effectively
- Gain insights on successfully implementing major crediting, measurement, and policy changes
As The Gorilla Glue Company’s brands, Gorilla Glue and O’Keeffe’s, experienced rapid growth, leadership faced a critical challenge: sustaining momentum, but not at the expense of one brand over the other. Complicating matters, sales strategies varied by channel, yet rewards and performance had traditionally been evaluated as a whole. To stay competitive, sales leadership needed a targeted approach to incentives—one that aligned account managers with strategic goals while preserving the company’s unique culture.
In this session, we’ll take a deep dive into The Gorilla Glue Company’s journey of refining its sales rewards strategy. Explore the key decisions, challenges, and lessons learned as the company transitioned from one growth phase to the next. Walk away with insights on how successful organizations evolve their rewards structures to drive long-term, balanced growth.
Key Takeaways
- Learn how to design effective sales compensation strategies tailored for Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG)
- Explore ways to align rewards with company culture and brand values while driving sustained growth
- Discover key do’s and don’ts to apply when evolving your own organization’s sales incentive programs
Let’s face it, sales crediting can quickly become a tangled mess—multiple contributors, subjective decisions, and inevitable conflicts. Who should get credit for a sale? How much should they receive? And when is the right time to award it? While recognizing contributions as close to the sale as possible is ideal for motivation, real-world complexities such as uncertain revenue, delayed payments, or team-based efforts, make it tricky.
In this session, we’ll explore practical strategies for designing a crediting system that aligns with your go-to-market model, revenue streams, and sales roles. We’ll break down key considerations for assigning credit fairly, minimizing conflict, and reducing the need for manual adjustments. Join us to untangle the challenges and create a system that works—most of the time!
Key Takeaways
- Understand when to split credit, double-credit, or withhold credit to ensure fairness and clarity.
- Learn how to balance revenue uncertainties while maintaining motivation and avoiding unintended annuities.
- Explore strategies to minimize exceptions while preserving fairness in unique situations.
- Discover how different incentive structures (commission vs. quota bonus) should shape your crediting rules.
The sales landscape is undergoing a seismic shift, with Usage-Based Pricing quickly becoming the dominant model for software and services. This transformation fundamentally changes the dynamics for sales teams and compensation structures. Traditional plans based on upfront sales volume will need to evolve.
This session will guide you through the necessary adjustments, offering innovative strategies to future-proof your sales compensation, boost sales team engagement, and maintain a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving market.
Key Takeaways
- Understand the unique challenges of usage-based pricing for sales compensation
- Reimagine incentive structures to align with a usage-based model
- Learn proven strategies to design compensation plans that drive success
- Get practical tips for navigating the change and keeping your sales team motivated
After two days of intelligent insights and structured learning, it's time to shift gears. This final session of Sales Comp ’25 puts you, the participants, at the center of the experience. You'll have the chance to shape the agenda, engage in spontaneous discussions, and collaborate with peers.
In this highly interactive session facilitated by a WorldatWork team member, you will:
- Set the Agenda: Start by proposing topics that matter most to you based on what you have heard and discussed during the preceding two days.
- Engage in Open Dialogues: Participate in informal, peer-led discussions that encourage knowledge sharing and innovative thinking. Exchange insights with fellow experts who are facing similar challenges. You’ll leave the conference with actionable plans to implement what you’ve learned fueled by connections that will continue once you head back to your day-to-day.
- Collaborate and Network: Work together in small groups to brainstorm solutions, develop new strategies, and create actionable plans. Build connections with like-minded professionals who can offer valuable perspectives and support.
This session is your opportunity to break away from the traditional conference mold and engage in a collaborative, participant-driven experience, and is the perfect opportunity to synthesize all you have learned. Come prepared to contribute, learn, and be inspired by the collective expertise of your Sales Comp ’25 peers.
Session Structure:
- Review Structure: Understand the format and objectives of the unconference.
- Propose and Select Topics: Attendees propose topics based on their interests and needs, then select which ones to discuss. Topics can be anything from the official conference agenda or extensions of discussions from previous sessions.
- Open Discussions: Engage in open, fluid discussions around the room. Attendees can move freely between topics, allowing for diverse input and collaboration.
- Second Round of Discussions: Repeat the topic selection and discussion process to explore additional areas of interest.
- Synthesize and Plan Next Steps: Reconvene to share insights from the discussions and outline actionable steps for implementing new ideas and strategies.
The goal of this unconference workshop is to empower you to choose what to discuss and with whom in a guided yet flexible manner. This is your chance to shape your own learning experience and leave Sales Comp’25 with concrete plans and new professional relationships.