Challenge
Support sales culture shift with stronger pay-for-performance plans aligned to market
A global financial tech organization needed to streamline and modernize its sales strategy—including sales plans and driving sales behaviors to sell new products and cross-sell offers—but faced several challenges.
For example, excessive spending on special performance incentive funds (SPIFs) scattered the sales team’s focus and didn’t drive the right strategic behaviors. The organization also lacked a solid compensation framework that reflected the market’s best practices and appealed to top talent.
To build a long-term, market-relevant roadmap that upheld company culture and addressed these challenges, the organization’s executive leadership partnered with Alexander Group to align sales behaviors with strategic objectives.
Solution
Aligning Sales Compensation with Market and Strategy
Alexander Group began with a comprehensive analysis of the client’s sales compensation program. The analysis included a thorough review of the client’s compensation program vs. market practices to support a market gap analysis and global roles review. By examining market practices, the team could identify key misalignment points and risk areas for attracting and retaining top talent.
During this review, Alexander Group looked at sales compensation competitiveness, both with and without equity, along with the SPIF program. The competitive analysis confirmed that outcomes did not significantly differentiate top and bottom performers. Low performers earned above market, while top performers earned below market. Alexander Group noted that the client reduced excessive and fragmented SPIF spending by 50% year-over-year, reallocating funds to support strategic goals and reinforce pay-for-performance. However, SPIF spending remained three times higher than market levels as a share of sales.
Alexander Group also conducted over 20 interviews with stakeholders across all levels and functions to gain a deeper understanding of opportunity areas and sensitivities. The team met with the client’s Sales Compensation team weekly and executive leadership monthly to iteratively develop and refine sales plan designs that align with modern go-to-market (GTM) shifts and support a pay-for-performance culture.
Based on these findings, Alexander Group built a phased recommendation plan to evolve the client’s sales compensation program over time.
Impact
Measurable Results and a Roadmap for Sustainable Growth
Alexander Group developed a three-year compensation evolution roadmap to balance company history and drive a stronger pay-for-performance culture while limiting attrition.
Key parts of this new roadmap included:
Repurposing the SPIF spend and installing a below goal inflection point to fund increases in above goal pay slopes without increasing comp costs.
Adjusting performance calculation so year-to-date performance measured against annual quota to drive H1 urgency and reduce over-payouts from attrition mid-year.
Simplify plan administration to increase speed and accuracy for payout calculations via design updates including reduced quota bands and pay curves.
Overall, the new FY plan aligned closely with market practices and had an increased focus on new products and new logo sales
Modernize your sales strategy with the right expertise
With Alexander Group’s insights, our client transformed their sales compensation program to be market-ready and appeal to top workers. If you’re ready to take the next step toward building a high-performing sales culture and optimizing your compensation strategy, contact the Alexander Group today to discuss how we can help you reach your full potential.
About Alexander Group
Alexander Group understands your revenue growth challenges. Since 1985, we’ve served more than 3,000 companies across the globe. This experience gives us not only a highly sophisticated set of best practices to grow revenue—we also have a rich repository of unique industry data that informs all our recommendations. Aligning product, marketing, operations and finance efforts behind a successful sales organization takes insight and hard work. We help the world’s leading organizations build the right revenue vision, transform their organizations and deliver results.
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