Every year, sales leaders sit down to redesign their compensation plan convinced that if they can just get the accelerators, the tiers, and the bonus triggers right, they'll finally unlock the performance they're chasing. Then they layer in a clawback to stop the sandbagging, a decelerator to discourage bad deals, a modifier to reward the behavior they wish they saw more of — and end up with a plan so complicated no rep can calculate their own paycheck, that still doesn't produce the behavior they wanted.

The problem isn't the plan. It's the belief that comp is the lever that drives motivation.

In this session, Keenan makes the contrarian case that comp plans are dramatically over-indexed as a motivational tool — and that the best sales organizations get diminishing returns on comp as a motivator, because their people are already driven by things a paycheck can't manufacture. Drawing on the psychology of incentives and real-world experience building plans for high-performing teams, Keenan will unpack what actually drives sales motivation (comp is only one of several forces, and rarely the most powerful), why strong cultures change the entire equation, and what comp is genuinely good at when you stop asking it to do a job it was never built for.

Attendees will leave with a sharper framework for building modern comp plans: why simplicity and real reward are non-negotiable, why using the plan to police bad behavior is the most expensive mistake in sales leadership, and how to think about the unintended costs — gaming, quality erosion, eroded trust — that clever plans quietly create. This is a talk for sales leaders, RevOps teams, and executives who are tired of rebuilding the same broken plan every year and want to understand the real mechanics of motivation, culture, and reward.

In this session, you'll learn:

• The four true drivers of sales motivation — and where comp actually fits
• Why powerful cultures get diminishing returns on comp as a motivator
• The two non-negotiable laws of any plan that works: simple and rewarding
• Why you should never use the comp plan to stop bad behavior
• The hidden, unintended costs that undermine even well-intentioned plans