Sales Incentive Manager

Key Responsibilities: Sales incentive plan strategy and design: - Lead the design and ongoing refinement of sales incentive plans, ensuring alignment with company objectives and desired seller behaviors. - Develop plan components such as measures, weights, thresholds, accelerators, payout mechanics, and special incentives. - Evaluate proposed plan changes through scenario modeling and business impact analysis before implementation. - Analyze plan effectiveness by evaluating seller behavior, attainment distribution, pay-for-performance alignment, and ROI on incentive spend. - Provide recommendations for leadership based on plan performance trends and business outcomes. Manage the full incentive plan lifecycle: - Own the annual incentive planning cycle and support in-year plan updates as business needs evolve. - Translate business strategy into practical, supportable compensation plans that can be operationalized with available systems, data, and processes. - Maintain plan documentation, policy rules, governance standards, and exception management processes to ensure clarity and consistency. Administer plan governance and operational execution: - Partner with key stakeholders to ensure accurate and timely implementation, and operational execution of sales incentive plans. - Establish strong governance over source data, plan rules, exception handling, policy interpretation, and audit readiness. - Partner with Finance on investigating and resolving compensation issues, disputes, and discrepancies in a timely and fair manner. Reporting, dashboards, and stakeholder communication: - Develop dashboards on Xactly and PowerBI, regular reporting, and executive-ready materials on plan performance, commission expense, attainment, and incentive outcomes. - Clearly communicate plan design, changes, and policy interpretations to Sales, Finance, HR, and business leadership. - Serve as a trusted subject matter expert on sales incentive plan design, governance, and administration. Cross-functional partnership and continuous improvement: - Partner with Sales Leadership, Finance, and HR teams to align incentive plans to company strategy and operational realities. - Improve processes, controls, workflows, and system capabilities to increase efficiency, transparency, and scalability. - Conduct market benchmarking and external research to keep plans competitive and aligned with industry practice. Qualifications: - Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Business, Economics, HR, or a related field. - Professional certification in sales compensation is a plus (e.g., CCP, Aon, AIHR). - 5-8+ years of experience in sales compensation, incentive compensation, revenue operations, or sales operations. - Experience with incentive compensation platforms and tools such as Salesforce and Xactly. - Strong experience with financial modeling, forecasting, and scenario analysis. - Demonstrated ability to work independently, manage multiple priorities, and operate successfully in a fast-paced environment. - Excellent analytical, problem-solving, communication, and stakeholder management skills. - High attention to detail and strong judgment in plan interpretation, policy application, and issue resolution.