When a go-to-market strategy lacks clear definitions around things like target customers, sales motions, ownership, and more, this ambiguity often lands on the sales compensation team.

You'll hear things like a new segment needs “a different plan.” Or when adoption lags, another measure will get proposed. Meanwhile, sellers are pushing back, which must mean the incentive needs to change...right?

Except, as our next guest on the podcast knows, the comp plan is not always the source of the problem. And it can't be responsible for creating strategic clarity that the business has yet to establish.

This challenge happens to be one of the core parts of Forma.ai's CEO Nabeil Alazzam’s conversation with Marnie Sprenger, Senior Director of Sales Compensation at Nutanix.

With experience spanning organizations like Cisco, Pure Storage, and Nutanix, Marnie has long learned to look beyond the plan document. Her view of the sales comp leader's role as a trusted advisor is broader. She insists you're often part designer, part detective, and, as she jokes, “70% therapist.”

As she explained with us, her approach to any new role in comp first involves prioritizing strong relationships across the business and understanding her stakeholders core needs (what everyone is actually trying to solve for). Sometimes the answer really is incentive design. But other times, the real constraint sits in segmentation, territory coverage, quota setting, total rewards, crediting, or the systems connecting them.

In this episode, Marnie discusses:

• The need to distinguish genuine incentive problems from upstream GTM problems

• Connecting compensation design to territory and quota quality

• Using governance to expose design weaknesses before launch

• And making consumption incentives visible enough to actually influence seller behavior

Below we've rounded up our favorite takeaways. Be sure to bookmark, subscribe, and check out the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Episode resources

• Connect with Marnie on LinkedIn  

• Marnie's book recommendations: Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing and Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder

Diagnose the specific GTM misalignment before redesigning the comp plan

Sales compensation is unusually visible. In short, not only does it affect earnings, it often attracts executive attention. Because when performance falls below a desired threshold, it offers leaders a tangible lever they can pull.

But this visibility also makes the comp plan an easy place to send problems that have not yet been properly defined.

Marnie sees this when a broad strategic direction (like building a differentiated enterprise motion), quickly becomes a ad hoc request for a new enterprise compensation plan, for example.

But, as you look closer, several critical questions may yet be unanswered on a request like this:

• Who exactly belongs in the segment?
• How will the territories differ?
• What will the seller be expected to do differently?
• Is the company changing the work, or simply trying to make the role more attractive?

Until these go-to-market decisions are clear, designing a new plan is premature. Here's Marnie on what this often sounds like in practice:

Ultimately, the strategic value of the sales compensation team lies partly in its ability to slow this leap from problem to prescription.

A request for a different plan may ultimately point toward a different market pay range, an equity decision, a role-definition issue, or a broader total compensation change, sure. Or it may reveal that leadership wants differentiation without asking sellers to produce a meaningfully different outcome.

The comp leader’s job is to get clear on these things before implementing another measure, exception, or plan variation.

To do this requires enough organizational trust to push back constructively. As Marnie notes, she has learned to invest heavily in relationships with sales leaders, the C-suite, and steering committee members because these relationships give her team permission to challenge initial requests.

And so, rather than immediately turning to plan mechanics, remember to run a short diagnostic brief upon receiving similar requests. I.e.:

• What business result are we trying to change? Define the commercial outcome before choosing the incentive.

• Whose behavior must change? Name the population and the observable action expected from them.

• What currently prevents that behavior? Compensation may be one constraint among several.

• What is genuinely different about this motion? A new label or segment does not automatically justify a new plan.

• Why is variable compensation the right intervention? Establish the causal argument, not simply the stakeholder preference.

When you ask the above questions, sales compensation stops receiving vaguely defined requests at the end of planning and begins proactively helping the business determine which problem it should solve in the first place.

Match incentive risk to quota and territory confidence

Even an elegantly designed comp plan will struggle when the underlying territories and quotas are weak. Marnie is absolutely clear about this.

The comp plan may be the most emotionally charged and financially sensitive part of the process, but its performance typically depends on decisions made elsewhere.

As Marnie shared, quota establishes what counts as expected performance. Territory design determines the opportunity available to pursue. And Ccrediting decides which outcomes appear in the seller’s results. The payout curve acts on top of all three.

This has an important implication for how you evaluate plan risk.

That is, a steep accelerator may look motivational in isolation. But if quota setting is inconsistent or territory potential varies significantly, that same accelerator can magnify planning error into unexpected payouts and perceived unfairness.

And so, the compensation design needs to reflect the organization’s confidence in the inputs beneath it.

Interestingly, the main thing Marnie sees value in is maintaining distinct accountability (separate teams can still own territories, quotas, pay mix, and compensation design). What can't remain separate is the decision logic.

The teams need a common language and a connected review process.

Before finalizing the plan, it's critical you bring the owners of territory, quota, compensation, Finance, HR, and sales strategy together to pressure-test:

• whether opportunity is distributed consistently enough to support the proposed quota methodology

• whether quota difficulty aligns with the expected attainment distribution

• how the pay curve behaves under realistic over- and under-assignment scenarios

• whether role definitions, pay mix, measures, and crediting rules describe the same job

• whether the data passing between planning and compensation systems preserves those decisions

More than cross-functional alignment for its own sake, this helps prevent one part of the revenue system from quietly compensating for weaknesses in another. A comp plan should amplify a coherent performance model, not absorb every inconsistency created upstream.

Before paying on consumption, ensure the behavior-to-payout path is visible

As Marnie knows from experience, the movement toward consumption- and adoption-based incentives introduces a new challenge.

A bookings measure usually has a familiar commercial event attached to it. The seller understands what they are trying to close, when the outcome occurs, and how it appears in the systems they use.

Consumption, on the other hand, can unfold gradually. It often depends on customer actions that occur after the contract is signed. The underlying data may live outside the CRM, update on a delay, or be difficult for the seller to interpret. This can all weaken the connection between action and reward.

Before adding a consumption measure, Marnie insists leaders need to determine whether the seller can follow the full story.

• What type of adoption should they influence?
• Which customer behavior generates credit?
• Where can they see progress?
• How frequently does the data update?
• When does an eligible event become a commissionable event?

A measure hidden behind several systems and opaque calculations may still be technically accurate, but it won't be motivational. For an incentive to shape behavior, sellers need sufficient line of sight across four stages:

Seller action → customer outcome → credited event → payout

A break anywhere in this chain creates risk.

If the seller cannot influence the customer outcome, the measure may feel unfair. If they cannot see the credited event, they cannot adjust their behavior. Which means a consumption compensation initiative should be evaluated as a seller experience and data-design problem, not simply a new plan component.

Before launching consumption pricing (or updates to your plan reflecting this new model), test whether:

• the seller knows the specific action expected of them

• that action has a credible relationship to consumption or adoption

• progress is visible in a system the seller can access

• ownership and attribution remain clear across the customer lifecycle

• the data arrives quickly enough to reinforce the intended behavior

• the payout can be traced back to recognizable customer events

Where the organization can't yet create visibility, you may need to improve the data path, provide supporting leading indicators, or reconsider whether consumption is ready to become a compensation measure.

Beyond, “can we calculate it?” you need to be concerned with whether a seller can see it, influence it, and trust it?

The best comp leaders make the revenue system legible

Throughout the conversation, Marnie returns to the idea that trust precedes influence.

Her ability to challenge a proposed solution with teams around her comes from the relationships she has built with sales and corporate leaders. Her team earns greater latitude when stakeholders believe its designs will deliver what was promised.

The same principle applies to sellers.

Marnie pushes back on the assumption that sales should inherently be treated as an adversary likely to game the plan. If leaders spend more time defending the plan from sellers than using it to direct productive behavior, the design and governance deserve another look.

As she says, a well-built program reduces the need to rely on personal trust alone. Expectations are clear. The mechanics support the desired behavior. Edge cases have a consistent process. Sellers can see how their work becomes credit and how that credit becomes earnings.

This is the broader role available to senior sales compensation leaders.

They know the complexity well enough to make it understandable. They connect the decisions that other functions own. And when the business asks compensation to solve a problem, they determine whether the plan is truly the right place to solve it.

Because the strongest comp programs make the entire performance system easier to understand, govern, and improve (not just calculate accurately).

Want more insights like this? Subscribe to The Sales Compensation Show on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or YouTube for bi-weekly episodes featuring the revenue leaders behind today’s fastest-growing companies.