Role Overview:
The Manager/Sr. Manager, Sales Compensation Strategy is a strategic business partner responsible for leading worldwide incentive compensation strategy and the design-to-deployment process for specific business units. This role is a hybrid of traditional functions in compensation, finance, sales operations, and strategic planning, and is critical to supporting the rapid growth of Salesforce’s sales teams.
Success in this Role Includes:
- Designing incentive compensation plans that are clear, measurable, cost-efficient, and effective.
- Effectively communicating compensation design and strategy in executive-level meetings and broader sales trainings, both visually (slides, emails, and other materials) and verbally (live meetings).
Responsibilities:
This role spans both strategic and operational responsibilities, including:
- Developing compensation recommendations aligned with business objectives.
- Influencing and building consensus among leaders.
- Collaborating across teams to ensure metrics are tracked and systems are updated to ensure employees are paid accurately and on time.
The ideal candidate should have a strong understanding of how software companies go-to-market and be able to align incentives with the responsibilities of various roles (e.g., sales development reps, account executives, industry specialists, product overlays, customer success, etc.).
Key Responsibilities:
- Build strong relationships with sales organization leadership and support teams to understand their needs and perspectives.
- Lead and improve the incentive compensation design-to-deployment process for specific business groups:
- Identify strategic business objectives.
- Assess the success of current incentives.
- Propose new incentive designs.
- Influence leaders to align on outcomes.
- Persuasively explain new incentives to leaders and employees.
- Project manage deployment solutions across multiple teams:
- While another team administers the plans and updates Salesforce’s compensation systems, this role will develop a high-level understanding of these systems to ensure capabilities are considered during the incentive design phase.
- Have courageous and candid conversations with sales leaders to address concerns and evaluate unique circumstances outside current compensation programs and policies (e.g., plan design exception requests).
- Design temporary incentives (e.g., “SPIFFs”) to support short-term strategic priorities.
- Collaborate with Finance to predict the cost of incentive compensation programs and plan overall design strategy.
Desired Skills & Experience:
- 5-7+ years of experience in consulting, compensation, finance, or strategy & operations.
- Advanced knowledge of incentive plan structures (quotas, accelerators, pay mix, and on-target earnings).
- Self-starter with the ability to independently drive projects to completion.
- Exceptional problem-solving skills with a demonstrated ability to structure complex problems and develop solutions.
- Expert presentation skills, particularly in building compelling slide presentations and presenting decisions to executive leadership.
- Strong project management skills and the ability to partner across functional areas (e.g., Sales, Finance, Operations, and HR).
