Case Study

Redesigning sales compensation to improve pay performance alignment for a distributor 

Opportunity/Issue

A distributor and equipment renter faced misaligned sales compensation, limiting growth. 

The client needed to realign incentives, improve pay-performance correlation, and transition to Standard Cost with limited disruption.   

Legacy Account Manager (AM) plans did not support growth and reduced strategic impact. Variations in planning created administrative complexity, fragmentation, and unclear migration paths.   

Commission structures relied on inconsistent cost methodologies, and a transition to Standard Cost required detailed modeling and validation. The company also needed to manage cost, competitiveness, and organizational buy-in during this transition.   

 


 

1
Approach/Solution

We conducted diagnostics to identify gaps in sales and pay-performance. 

We designed a future-state AM architecture including growth multipliers and vendor-based differentiation. In addition, we simplified the Sales Manager (SM) plan to two core measures with increased variable leverage.   

We modeled more than 20 performance distributions to quantify displacement, cost, and ROI across multiple scenarios. We also modeled legacy and new plans under Standard Cost and designed a 2026 migration plan.   

2
Outcome/Result

The client aligned incentives and improved pay-performance alignment. 

The new plans strengthened alignment with attainment and growth, with a modeled ~3% uplift in revenue and an improved ROI on compensation investment.  

This transition stabilized cost with less than 1% total cost change under Standard Cost modeling and balanced impact across regions.   

This framework also delivered a repeatable approach to diagnostics, design, modeling, and migration.

3

Driving measurable value creation.

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