Imagine taking over global sales compensation and, within twenty days, everyone is paid wrong.

For most people, this kind of crisis could end all interest in continuing a sales comp career. But for Gavin Tapper, it became the catalyst shaping him into a highly trusted global sales compensation leader.

Over the last decade-plus, Gavin’s logged well over 30,000 hours running sales comp at scale; owning compensation plan design, operations, data, and executive stakeholder management across complex global orgs. He’s led teams through incentive compensation software changes, plan overhauls, and multi-million-dollar payout decisions.

So when he shares his take on attainment data, or how to sell plan changes to a skeptical sales org, he’s pulling from hard-won experience.

In this episode, Nabeil Alazzam has Gavin unpack how an early “baptism by fire” go-live (and all that followed!) informed how Gavin thinks about systems, trust, data, and careers in sales compensation today.

Below we've distilled his reusable takeaways for anybody looking to tighten up their credible engine. Check out the ideas worth stealing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and below (on YouTube).

Episode resources

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

• Book recommendation: The New Rational Manager by Charles Higgins Kepner and Benjamin B. Tregoe

• Book: Diagnosing the System for Organizations by Stafford Beer

• Book: It's Not Luck by Eliyahu M Goldratt

Learnings from leading through a payout crisis

Gavin’s first foray into sales compensation was stepping into a high-stakes incentive management platform change that had already been set into motion prior to his arrival.  

With a new system and just 15 days to first payroll, the initial payroll run went out, but then came the flood: reps across the org sharing they'd been paid incorrectly.  

Here's Gavin on this unconventional start:

From this early experience, Gavin extracted some key learnings that still serve him today:

1) You can use a three-lever diagnostic for nearly every comp issue that arises (and build systems from there)

Under pressure, Gavin focuses on simplifying sales comp chaos into three questions:

1. Is the transaction amount wrong?

2. Is the credit wrong?

3. Is the earnings calculation wrong?

Everything (typically) ladders back into one (or more) of these levers. At scale, this can become a diagnostic system. That is, you can build a standard issue intake that forces classification into one of the three buckets: transaction, credit, earnings. You can then create and run playbooks by issue type:

• Transaction → CRM, billing, order management.

• Credit → attribution rules, territory/overlay logic, effective dates.

• Earnings → rate tables, caps/floors, plan logic, FX, proration.

Playbooks per grouping can make it easier to track issue volume by lever in your ops reviews. Which then reveals where you might want to invest your time further: data quality, design clarity, or system rules.

Ultimately, you're looking to establish a shared operating manual for escalations.

Gavin advises that you can build credibility through any comp reset by turning it into a repeatable way of thinking about risk, learning curves, and operational readiness.

How to sell plan changes to a skeptical sales org (the mosaic metaphor)

When you’re rolling out meaningful plan changes to an entire global sales force, SKO is your stage and an informal referendum. In the past, Gavin and his CRO at the time, Jason Andrew, knew this.

The two were introducing a plan with both:

• Attractive upside levers (richer accelerators), and also...

• Necessary constraints (tighter crediting rules in some areas).

Predictably, they expected leaders to love the upside, yet lobby hard against the guardrails. So Jason introduced a metaphor that has stuck ever since: the mosaic.

Here's Gavin on why this storytelling device was so helpful for gaining buy in:

In short: you can’t pull tiles out of a mosaic and still have a picture. As they explained to sales leaders, if you want the beautiful parts of the plan, you have to keep less glamorous tiles that make the whole thing work.

This was a particularly helpful way to gain group understanding whenever someone objected to a specific guardrail. You simply couldn't pick and choose.

How to use the mosaic concept in your own SKO

When you’re introducing a major change:

1. Tell the whole-picture story first.

• What business problems is your proposed plan solving?
• How do different elements support each other (cost, behavior, risk)?

2. Label the trade-offs explicitly.

• “We’re able to offer this richer accelerator because we’ve tightened credit in these edge cases here and here.”

• “We’ve shifted dollars from X to Y to fuel the strategy we’ve aligned on.”

3. Equip leaders to repeat the metaphor.
   After SKO, your sales leaders will be fielding questions, so give them the language to share. I.e.: “If we remove that clause, we’ll have to pull back on this upside over here...”, and “that’s one tile in a larger mosaic.”

The beauty of this mosaic approach is that it signals the system was thought through holistically.

In working sessions, Gavin adds another powerful constraint forcing leaders to think about comp in terms of tradeoffs. That is—you can only ask for “more” if you specify what you’re giving back.

This avoids the open-ended: “Let’s double the new logo bonus” or “Our team should get higher rates”, and instead transforms negotiations into something like: “we’d like to increase this bonus by X, and we propose funding it by reducing Y.”

This reframes comp debates from wish lists to portfolio allocation, which is exactly how senior leaders should think.

This mindset shift positions the Sales Comp or RevOps leadership function as a strategic allocator of finite resources, not simply a yes or no gatekeeper.

On the need to treat attainment data very carefully

If there’s one pet peeve Gavin gets animated about, it’s attainment data. Largely because it is so often misused and misunderstood.

The simple question “can you send me the attainment data?”, is very nuanced as different questions require different attainment.

Here's Gavin to explain:

In this clip, Gavin calls out a few concrete situations where “attainment” actually means very different things depending on the use case. Take club qualification, for example. There, you’re asking who is still active at year end, whether they crossed whatever threshold qualifies them for club, and how to treat edge cases like people who changed roles mid-year or joined partway through the period. Even that seemingly simple question is already full of nuance.

Now contrast that with costing and modeling. In this context, you can’t ignore people who left the company. Attrition is going to happen again next year, so your attainment profile has to include both the reps who churned and the ones still in seat. On top of that, the data has to be normalized to 100% performance if you’re using it to price a new plan; you’re not trying to replay last year, you’re trying to understand what the cost would be if everyone hit target under the new design.

When you mash all of this together, you can see the risk. I.e. if someone just pulls three years of attainment by current role from the CRM, they can very easily misclassify entire segments of the field and make bad calls on cost, headcount, or performance —all off the back of a seemingly simple request.

What a senior data steward does differently

This in mind, Gavin argues that a true senior data steward treats attainment as decision-grade data, not just another report to push out. This starts with banning context-free requests.

When someone asks for “the attainment data,” the default response shouldn’t be to export a spreadsheet, it should be to ask what decision they’re trying to make.

Are they modeling cost? Selecting club winners? Assessing performance? Making headcount calls? Each of those questions requires a different cut, and Gavin’s point is that you can’t responsibly serve any of them until you know which one you’re supporting.

He also stresses that sales comp has to own the effective-dated view of the go-to-market engine. CRM is inherently point-in-time whereas compensation needs history. This means maintaining a view of role history and mappings, how territories and coverage have shifted, and how quotas and plan versions have changed over time.

Additionally, every attainment dataset needs clear documentation. You need to see what it includes and excludes, how it treats terms, transfers, and mid-year changes, and in which situations it’s appropriate—or dangerous—to use.

Ultimately, Gavin reiterates you’re not in the comp role just to pull numbers on demand. You’re there to protect the business from bad decisions made with incomplete context, and it’s your job to insist on that context up front.

Invest in understanding your people as deeply as you understand plans

When it comes to scaling an effective sales comp team, Gavin's approach goes well beyond tight processes and clean operations. He’s deliberately people-focused. As he shared, you can’t run a high-trust, high-impact function if you don’t understand whether people are in the right roles, or how to work with personalities very different from your own.

For this, he leans on a few tools. First, CliftonStrengths (Gallup) helps him understand where his natural strengths lie and whether his role actually plays to them. From there, Insights or color profiles give him a simple way to read and adapt to different stakeholder types (i.e. how he should speak to a CRO versus a CFO or CHRO, for example). And finally, Simon Sinek’s “Find Your Why” helped him articulate his personal, underlying motivation.

He applies this same professional development mindset to his team:

He encourages people to take strengths assessments and talk openly about the results so everyone has language for “this is what energizes me” and “this is where I struggle.”

He trains his teams on at least one stakeholder or personality framework so they can adjust their style depending on who’s across the table. And lastly, he asks people to clarify their own “why,” so the work isn’t just about clearing disputes or maintaining a system—it’s about the impact they’re having on the business and on sellers’ livelihoods.

Scale with a common language and sustainable pacing

When Gavin talks about building teams, two themes recur: a common language for solving problems, and a sustainable pace for doing the work.

On the language side, he leans on structured approaches like Kepner-Tregoe’s “The New Rational Manager.” Wherein, the goal isn’t to turn everyone into consultants, but instead it’s to give the team a shared mental model for what it means to define a problem clearly, analyze causes, and evaluate options. When people use the same vocabulary and follow the same steps, post-mortems, plan reviews, and design sessions become far more productive and far less emotional.

Equally important is how Gavin thinks about pace. He's explicit that success isn’t just “we shipped the plan,” it's delivering while preserving work–life balance as a team. In a function that naturally attracts last-minute requests, fire drills, and escalation-heavy projects, that’s a deliberate leadership stance. He expects the team to have a clear, repeatable way of working, not to live in permanent hero mode.

Practically, this leadership approach means Gavin chooses a problem-solving framework and actually training people on it, then using it consistently in post-mortems and design reviews.

From baptism by fire to a repeatable approach to sales comp

Gavin’s sales compensation career may have started in crisis, but what's defined him is what he built afterward; a way of compartmentalizing chaos into manageable problem sets, and a firm belief that operational trust is the true first principle of sales compensation.

From storytelling devices like the mosaic that make complex plan changes understandable, to a deep respect for attainment data as decision infrastructure, Gavin shared ideas in this episode that any senior Sales Comp or RevOps leader can learn from.

Watch the full conversation and share excerpts with your team as a starting point for how you want to:

• Talk about plan changes at SKO and beyond
• Define and govern attainment data across your org
• Develop the next generation of sales comp leaders

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.