Director of Sales Compensation

General Summary:

The Director of Sales Compensation leads the strategy, design, and evolution of sales compensation programs that motivate performance, support scalable growth, and strengthen financial discipline. This role partners closely with Sales, Finance, HR, and executive leadership to align incentive programs with revenue goals, market practices, seller productivity, and sound governance. The role requires deep expertise in incentive design, quantitative modeling, business partnership, and cross-functional influence, along with the ability to lead and develop a team.

Essential Job Functions:

Sales Compensation Strategy & Plan Design

• Lead design, implementation, and ongoing evaluation of sales incentive programs across business lines, channels, and revenue models.
• Align incentive structures to company strategy, financial goals, go-to-market priorities, and desired sales behaviors.
• Design core sales compensation components, including target compensation, pay mix, quotas, crediting rules, payout mechanics, and risk controls.
• Use market data, performance results, and feedback to improve simplicity, affordability, and line of sight to earnings.

Quota Setting, Modeling & Financial Partnership

• Partner with Sales, Finance, and Revenue Operations to establish data-driven quota methodologies.
• Build models to assess compensation cost, payout curves, earning opportunity, performance differentiation, and financial risk.
• Support budgeting, forecasting, accruals, reconciliations, and variance analysis.
• Analyze quota attainment and present recommendations, trade-offs, and risks to senior leaders.

Administration & Communication

• Establish scalable governance for approvals, documentation, eligibility, communications, exceptions, disputes, and change control.
• Lead the annual sales compensation planning cycle, including timelines, decision rights, approvals, and implementation.
• Oversee sales compensation operations, including eligibility, quotas, crediting, calculations, adjustments, statements, reconciliations, and payouts.
• Create clear compensation documents and partner with Legal, HR, Finance, Payroll, and Internal Audit on compliance and controls.

Analytics & Technology

• Develop dashboards to evaluate quota attainment, payout distribution, compensation cost, productivity, and program effectiveness.
• Identify unintended incentives, data-quality issues, administrative gaps, and improvement opportunities.
• Guide sales compensation technology strategy and integrations across CRM, finance, payroll, HR, data, and reporting platforms.
• Leverage automation, analytics, and AI tools to improve modeling accuracy, reporting speed, anomaly detection, documentation, and workflow consistency.

Leadership & Cross-Functional Partnership

• Serve as a trusted advisor to Sales, Finance, and senior leaders on incentive strategy, seller motivation, productivity, and revenue growth.
• Build cross-functional alignment across business priorities, participant experience, and financial discipline.
• Lead change management for new incentive programs, measures, quotas, systems, and policy updates.
• Lead and develop team members, project resources, consultants, and technology partners as needed.

Supportive Job Functions:

1. Stay current on sales compensation practices, technology, AI, regulatory considerations, and market trends.
2. Support revenue growth, commercial effectiveness, and transformation initiatives.
3. Perform other duties as assigned.