Inside a telco giant like Rogers, every comp change is a bet on behavior at national scale.  

That’s the reality Les Reif lives in as Senior Director of Sales Compensation—and it’s what he unpacked in his conversation with Nabeil Alazzam on the most recent episode of The Sales Compensation Show.

This episode isn’t a neat “how-to” on a single topic. It’s a tour through how this senior leader thinks about data, design, governance, and people when the stakes are enterprise-wide.

Les and Nabeil chat about common enterprise-scale realities, rollout patterns that really work based on what Les has seen in real life, and examples of problem solving for plans at scale.

Even if you never touch a plan in the telco space, Les’ lenses are broadly useful. He discusses how he perceives the function as a data translation engine, the challenge of resisting knee-jerk comp tweaks, investing heavily in governance, communication, and escalation processes, plus how to think about avoiding complex plan proliferation.

We've summed up some takeaways below but be sure to watch the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. It’s a chance to compare notes with someone who’s navigating all the same tradeoffs at massive scale.

Episode resources

• Connect with Les—a founding member of our Sales Comp Think Tank— on LinkedIn  

• Les' book recommendation: Adam Grant’s Give and Take

Comp isn’t a simple math problem — it’s often a data translation problem

Les didn’t come up through “traditional” sales comp. He came in through data.

At BlackBerry, he owned enterprise customer data and predictive analytics. The business decided to start paying sellers based on that data—and before he knew it, he was in the world of sales compensation.

As he shared with us, the math is the easy part. The hard part is typically figuring out what goes into the attainment bucket.

At Rogers, this shows up in things like:

• Defining renewals when customers have parent accounts and sub-accounts,

• Distinguishing “new” vs. “expansion” vs. “churn save” on the same large account, and

• Creating new derived data from raw data (e.g., renewal flags, net growth) via rules that may not have existed before.

In short, Les’ team isn’t just calculating commissions. They’re translating business concepts into data logic, then maintaining that logic as the business morphs and evolves ongoing.

How you can apply this lens

Treat your team as the owners of business definitions in data, not merely calculators:

• Codify the vocabulary with RevOps. Document exactly what “new logo,” “renewal,” “expansion,” “upsell,” and “churn save” mean in your world—in both business and data terms.

• Build once, govern forever. Assume every new definition becomes an ongoing data product that needs ownership, QA, and change management.

• Ask better questions upstream. When someone proposes a new metric, ask: What source system(s) does this live in? What edge cases break this definition? And who owns this metric if the business changes?

Your leverage isn’t better formulas. It’s tighter control of what reality actually flows into those formulas.

Les' take? Comp should not always be the first lever you pull

One of the strongest themes in the conversation: that the common instinct to “just change the plan” is overused.

In the Mythbusters segment of the show, Les called out a familiar pattern:

When numbers are off, and pressure builds, and the first idea to hit the table is often,“let’s tweak comp.”

But he pushes back on this:

Sometimes the real issue is execution or performance management, not incentives, sometimes it's quota setting or role design.

Here's Les on why change the compensation plan shouldn’t always be your first move, and how he reframes those conversations with the business:

Ultimately, every mid-year comp tweak carries hidden costs—be it edge cases, data workarounds, manual processes that live forever. Instead of jumping straight into comp changes, you need to invesigate the core problem underlying the ask.

For example, as Les pointed out from his own experience: a stakeholder could want to switch from paying on gross to net growth for a product—a seemingly logical move. But when you stress-test this, you can uncover that account transitions mid-year inadvertantly penalize a new rep for losses that happened before they inherited the account. Only paying on net can create scenarios that mask important activity and pipeline effort, and it can add complexity in tracking and explaining net outcomes at the rep level.

Rather than being the “no” team, when encounteing asks like this, Les’ group comes back with options. They:

1. Clarify the business problem vs. intaking a requested solution (“We want reps focused on profitable growth, not just activity”).

2. Generate 2–3 design alternatives that address it—each with pros, cons, and operational impact.

3. Recommend an option that balances behavior change with complexity and fairness.

Questions to ask before you touch the plan:

Based on Les' advise and how he handles this at at a national scale, next time someone proposes a comp change, run this quick filter:

• What exact behavior are we trying to change?

• Could this be solved with coaching, enablement, quota changes, or role clarity instead?

• What operational debt are we taking on (manual calculations, exception handling, disputes)?

• Will this create edge cases that feel unfair to reps (especially around territory moves and transitions)?

Comp should absolutely be one of your growth levers—but if it’s always the first one you pull, you’ll end up with a messy system that’s hard to operate and even harder to explain.

Design for optionality without drowning in complexity

Rogers is exactly the kind of environment where complexity can spiral: multiple channels, product lines, legacy systems, and the integration of Shaw.

As Les shared:

• Most business units see plan changes every year—almost never a “no-change” year.

• Stakeholders want to emphasize new products, target new segments, or adjust weightings.

• It’s easy to end up with 50+ plan variants if you say yes to every nuance.

His way through: optional, but not infinite.

You don’t want endless options, rather one page of well-designed choices.

Here's Les on how he gives the business enough meaningful choice, without letting complexity run wild:

In practice, this means:

• Standard plan “chassis” (e.g., monthly payouts against quarterly quota; rate-card models in certain channels)

• Common rules and structures reused across business units

• Flexibility within those chassis: i.e. adjusting metric weightings, splitting a metric into separate product pillars, or using gates or accelerators for true strategic priorities

For your own org, try structuring design conversations where you first pick a chassis, then limit the knobs stakeholders can turn (metric mix and weights, thresholds and caps, use of accelerators on 1-2 focus areas), and then standardize rules wherever possible. I.e. one approach to proration, or one approach to crediting for shared or transferred accounts.

This way, you give the business real choice over what matters—but keep the system administerable, explainable, and scalable.

Plan rollout is where trust is won or lost

Design is only half the game. The other half is getting your plan signed off and understood.

At Rogers, Les makes governance a multi-stakeholder sport from day one, involving feedback from reps, Sales, & Sales Operations, Finance, HR / Total Rewards, and the sales president and CHRO as ultimate approvers.

As Les shared, stakeholders are not brought in at the end to rubber-stamp. They’re at the table through regular plan-design working sessions and have clear sign-off deadlines. They participate in a negotiation on new ideas, and compensation can decide whether the ideas fit.

Once the plan is locked, the focus shifts to communication and roadshows—especially for the more complex enterprise plans. These are joint sessions Rogers Communications runs with Sales Compensation, Sales Ops, and Sales leaders. The sessions target a specific audience, (like West-AEs/specific channels), and include detail walk throughs of:

• How the plan works

• How quotas were set

• What will show up on commission statements

Below, Les walks through the Rogers Communication roadshow and comms strategy for launching new plans at the start of the fiscal:

Les is realistic: many reps don’t fully engage until the first paycheck hits under the new plan. Which is why Rogers times these roadshow sessions close to first payout and back the roadshow process up with:

• Defined processes for questions, corrections, and escalations,

• Forums to review scenarios where the seller has done the right thing, but it's not cleanly covered by the plan, and

• Precedent-setting decisions so similar future cases are handled consistently.

Overall, as Les maintains, trust isn’t built by having a perfect plan (there are always scenarios you'll miss). It’s built by having a visible, fair, and repeatable process when things are imperfect.

Your real competitive advantage? The team you build

When Nabeil asked what truly makes or breaks a compensation function, Les was adamant, it's amazing people.

Like many large enterprises, Les shared Rogers operates with legacy and acquired systems that don’t always integrate cleanly, ongoing data cleanup and system consolidation, and high expectations on accuracy and speed.

Incentive compensation management software or tools help—but Les is clear:

You can teach technical skills. It’s much harder to teach the mindset.

When he hires, Les looks for:

• Technical capability (systems, data, quasi-programming for ETL and config),

• Attitude and grit (curiosity, willingness to “roll up sleeves,” and follow through), and

• Excellent communication (keeping stakeholders informed, explaining issues, fixes, and progress clearly)

If he had to choose, he’d pick attitude over existing tool experience:

For senior leaders, this is a good moment to check your own bench:

• Do you have at least a couple of systems/data “athletes” who can diagnose problems end-to-end?

• Are you hiring for curiosity and ownership, not just vendor logos on a résumé?

• Do you protect team culture by addressing low-ownership behavior quickly?

• Do you create space for your “givers” to mentor others—multiplying expertise across the org?

If your tech stack isn’t perfect (and whose is?), the right team is what turns a messy environment into a reliable engine.

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