Brandon Farb (one of the Top 50 Sales Comp Leaders to Watch in 2025) sits at a rare intersection in the world of Sales Performance Management—leading the teams responsible for both Sales Planning and Compensation at Allstate Canada.

It’s an org structure only a few adopt, but one Brandon confirms is key to driving alignment, agility, and results.

In this episode of The Sales Compensation Show, Brandon shared how unifying these two functions has helped his team respond faster to market conditions, build trust with the field, and create plans that are not only achievable—but motivating.

With a career background spanning underwriting, operations, and performance management, Brandon brings a uniquely holistic lens to sales strategy. He’s not just designing comp plans—he’s shaping how sales strategy gets operationalized across Allstate Canada’s channels.

Whether you're navigating a compensation redesign, grappling with quota setting, or trying to better connect GTM strategy with field execution, Brandon's episode offers clear, hard-won insights you’ll want to bring back to your team.

Catch the full episode, and some of the most compelling takeaways below.

Episode resources

• Connect with Brandon on LinkedIn

• Book recommendation: Levelling Up: 12 Questions to Elevate Your Personal and Professional Development by Ryan Leak

Why sales planning and compensation are better together

As Nabeil and Brandon discussed, far too often, organizations treat sales planning and compensation as entirely separate, siloed functions.  

Sales Ops owns quota setting and territory design, comp teams manage plan administration and payouts, all the while this separation creates an unintended consequence: a disjointed seller experience and unclear performance expectations.

Brandon believes the best results come when these two functions are tightly integrated.  

As he shared, one of the biggest risks of separating planning from comp design is misalignment. When forecasting, quotas, and incentives are each built in isolation (or when the data that's inextricably connected isn't shared across one source of truth system), it creates downstream confusion for reps:

“Companies separate the two functions because they want to keep sales planning functions focused on strategy, setting quotas, territory design, driving a certain mix of business or getting revenue goals. And they think about sales compensation [differently] as rewarding performance and incentivizing output.

Nabeil underscored how inefficient this silo is. When one team makes decisions without direct input from the other, it creates a loop of back-and-forth reviews, rework, and delays—all of which slow execution and erode confidence across the sales org.

Brandon has seen the real cost of that divide. When planning and comp aren’t aligned, reps are left guessing:

“When there's misalignment, people are unsure about the targets and the quotas and the output they're supposed to deliver. They're unsure about the mix of business and their opportunities to make a ton of money and to deliver on the company objectives.”

To battle any uncertainty at Allstate Canada, Brandon brings planning and compensation together into one function — enabling clearer design, faster iteration, and better alignment with frontline behavior.

Ultimately, if your sales planning and compensation teams aren’t operating in lockstep, your reps will feel it first. Integration creates a tighter feedback loop, clearer goals, and improved performance. Siloed functions lead to siloed results.

Shifting to quarterly planning can increase agility and help you maintain momentum

Another topic Nabeil and Brandon touched on was on annual planning cycles which can leave teams flat-footed today. In volatile markets, static annual plans quickly fall out of step with reality. Which is why Brandon opts for quarterly planning — not just for speed, but for relevance.

“We shifted back to sort of a quarterly planning directive from an annual planning basis to ensure our quotas are updated on a continuous basis, that we're driving the right benefits for the field, that we're keeping people hungry through the end of the month, and keeping our designs and plan innovative...."

This shorter cadence keeps comp plans fresh and relevant. It signals to the field that leadership is paying attention, adapting, and committed to shared success. Further to this, Brandon’s team runs regular feedback sessions with reps and managers, using live insights to guide planning.

Here's Brandon on how he thinks about striking the perfect balance of sales targets, quotas, and comp plans:

Overall, if your planning cycle (or sales performance management software!) can’t adapt to rapid market shifts or field feedback, it’s time to shorten it and consider other avenues to become more agile. Even if you don’t change the plan quarterly, the cadence of review and communication can drive better alignment.

On balancing simplicity and strategic complexity in comp design

Compensation plans, by nature, are complex. They involve modeling, financial forecasting, and behavioral economics. But as Brandon points out—none of that matters if your sellers don't understand how to win.

“Salespeople love to sell. They're not so worried about the back end and figuring out the math...They want to know how they can sell and make money."

At Allstate Canada, Brandon’s team designs for simplicity at the individual level while maintaining strategic complexity behind the scenes. That means he's communicating clear payout rules, intuitive metrics, and demonstrating direct line-of-sight to earnings—even if the backend logic is far more nuanced.

Brandon illustrates the impact of this with an analogy that'll stick with you:

“Think of a tube of toothpaste. There are those when the tube gets near the end, [they'll] throw it away and start a new one. They'll say, you know, I'm ready to start a new challenge, a new opportunity...And then there are those [that say] there's one drop of toothpaste left. I want to squeeze that tube to drive that last sale. They don't want to leave anything on the table.”

By designing plans that reward incremental effort — like reaching multipliers, achieving quality mix, or unlocking SPIFFs—you give every seller a reason to push through to the next milestone.

Segmentation without chaos: Designing comp plans that motivate across the curve

Not every seller is motivated by the same things—which is why segmentation matters. But as Brandon points out, it’s not enough to design segmented plans. You have to communicate them with absolute clarity.

At Allstate Canada, Brandon’s team uses performance tiers to segment compensation across roles, regions, and achievement levels. High performers earn more—not just through payouts, but through layered benefits. Meanwhile, the middle stays engaged with achievable targets, transparent design, and visibility into how to move up.

“Everybody has access to the same structure, but those who hit the higher revenues get higher compensation—and some of the benefits around it.”

The key? Communication. Clear documentation, performance dashboards, and regular check-ins. This ensures everyone understands how they’re being measured and what’s possible.

Ground comp design in data—and field empathy

Lastly, while comp plans need to be data-informed, Brandon emphasized his focus on encompassing the lived experience of sellers. Brandon blends historical data, market dynamics, and direct feedback to build plans that perform.

By pairing segmentation data with rep feedback, his team designs plans that not only drive revenue, but also feel fair and achievable to those executing them.

Takeaway: Don’t just analyze performance—understand the people behind it. Data alone can’t tell you what’s motivating (or frustrating) your reps.

Brandon’s approach to sales compensation is grounded in empathy, driven by data, and shaped by real-world sales experience. If you're rethinking how your planning and comp functions interact—or how to better motivate every tier of your salesforce—this episode is packed with ideas.

🎧 Catch the full episode to hear even more on plan design, quota agility, how plan rollout can be treated like a product launch, and leading change inside a complex sales org.