Description

• 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).