Every sales compensation plan is a strategy document, whether leadership intends it to be or not.

If you say retention is a company priority, for example, but virtually all of a seller’s upside sits on new business and expansion. The field gets the message.

Tell two sales teams created through an acquisition to go collaborate, then give only one side credit for the deal. They'll get that message, too.

This theme runs through Forma.ai CEO's Nabeil Alazzam’s conversation with Shefali Raghavan, SVP of GTM Strategy & Operations at G2, on the latest episode of The Sales Compensation Show.

Shefali is an incredible guest on a range of topics. She began her career in consulting and private equity, then became one of Twitter’s first sales operations hires before taking on operating roles at Salesforce, Airtable, and now G2, where her remit spans the broader GTM engine.

Shefali sees compensation from upstream. From strategy as it pertains to market choice, through to organizational design, systems, enablement, then incentives.

As she's adamant about, compensation must come last in the sequence. It amplifies the GTM decisions an organization has already made. The quality of the incentive plan depends very heavily on the clarity of the operating system feeding it.

Here are four ideas from the fantastic conversation worth carrying into your next planning cycle, enterprise expansion, or GTM integration.

Episode resources

• Connect with Shefali on LinkedIn  
• Listen on Spotify
• Listen on Apple Podcasts
• Book recommendations: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, and Atomic Habits by James Clear

Go through your comp plan backwards to audit the strategy

Ask Shefali to diagnose what a company cares about and she looks to the compensation plan. Because ultimately, as she puts it, people do what they're paid to do.

Which makes the comp plan an effective test of whether a strategic priority has survived the journey from executive discussion to field execution.

Take retention, for example. Leadership can spend an entire kickoff talking about protecting the customer base. But if a rep’s economics remain overwhelmingly geared toward expansion or acquisition, however, the incentive system is still telling them where to spend their next hour.

So this year, reverse the usual plan review process.

Instead of opening with plan mechanics, start with the handful of outcomes leadership says matter most. Then trace each one through the GTM system. Where does seller behavior influence it? What reinforces that behavior today? Which outcomes genuinely warrant compensation leverage?

A gap doesn't automatically mean adding another measure or changing a plan mid-cycle. In fact, that can create unnecessary complexity. But it does mean leadership needs to decide what mechanism will carry the strategy, whether that's compensation, management accountability, enablement, coverage design, or something else.

As we regularly talk about here at Forma.ai, you can't make comp responsible for every business priority. But you should ensure the plan never contradicts the priorities sellers are expected to influence.

• If new logo acquisition matters more this year, where does that preference show up economically? ‍
• If retention has become critical, what prevents growth incentives from encouraging the wrong trade-offs? ‍
• If a new segment is strategically important, are territories, quotas, enablement, and compensation all telling the same story?

When these answers disagree, the problem started before the plan document did.

Earn the right to add enterprise complexity

Shefali saw another version of the sequencing problem while working across product-led and enterprise sales motions.

In a strong PLG business, much of the early GTM challenge is about capturing demand that already exists.

Customers raise their hands, then operations needs to route that demand effectively. Capacity matters. Systems matter. But territory and incentive structures can remain relatively simple.

Moving upmarket changes this equation.

Now the org needs to decide where it has a right to win, how it will segment the market, what kind of sellers it needs, how territories should work, and eventually how quotas and compensation reinforce that design.

There is an important gate before any of those questions, though, as Shefali points out:

Is the business actually ready to sell enterprise?

Shefali names fundamentals like security, encryption, and the requirements large companies impose before a seller ever gets a serious shot at an enterprise deal. And notes a richer accelerator can't solve for a product that a Fortune 500 company is unable to buy.

Seller readiness matters just as much.

A PLG motion may begin with a passionate product user somewhere inside a large account. Turning that foothold into a meaningful enterprise relationship requires a seller who can multi-thread through the organization, find power, build a champion, and eventually conduct a credible conversation with a VP or C-level buyer.

That's a substantial jump in selling motion.

So before redesigning comp around bigger enterprise quotas, pressure-test the layers underneath it with a page out of Shefali's playbook:

• Product readiness: Can the enterprise actually buy, approve, and deploy what you sell? ‍
• Market readiness: Do you have enough evidence to know which segments, verticals, or accounts deserve investment? ‍
• Seller readiness: Can the team progress from an enthusiastic user to economic power? ‍
• Operating readiness: Do capacity, segmentation, coverage, territories, and enablement support that motion?

Then compensation can reinforce it.

This is especially useful when the mandate is simply to “move upmarket.” That sentence can trigger a huge amount of premature GTM complexity. Shefali’s framework forces the organization to establish which constraint it is actually trying to solve before turning the comp plan into the answer.

Build a shared operating language before asking acquired teams to sell together

Shefali emphasized she's all about building systems that outlive your tenure at an organization. And in her experience, few moments create more pressure to skip steps than an acquisition.

The deal closes, and leadership wants the combined sales organization in market quickly.

Shefali has seen that pressure from several angles, including her time at Salesforce and now through G2’s acquisition of Gartner Digital Markets.

But her advice is to be deliberate about what “integration” requires. That is — before two sales teams can operate together, they need to understand the business in the same language.

Just think about when two CRMs are involved.

A “target account” in one organization may be defined using an entirely different propensity model than a “target account” in the other. Product taxonomies differ. Customer records differ. Sales stages can mean different things. Even familiar terminology may hold different assumptions.

Sending sellers into the field before resolving enough of that foundation creates friction exactly where leadership is hoping to create leverage:

Shefali’s sequencing here is helpful because she notes sales is not the first group she brings together.

RevOps or GTM Ops, finance, IT, HR, and other operational teams need to establish the roadmap, systems, definitions, and milestones that eventually make a combined commercial motion possible.

In the meantime, there can be value in allowing each business to keep operating effectively rather than dismantling what made either company successful in the first place.

For an integration leader, the practical question becomes:

What has to be common before the field can behave as one team?

That may include account taxonomy, CRM visibility, customer ownership, product definitions, opportunity rules, territory logic, or the mechanics of crediting.

Lay these dependencies out explicitly. Turn them into quarterly milestones and OKRs. Give executive leadership visibility into what becomes possible as each layer comes online. It provides a much better answer to “why can’t we move faster?” than a generic warning about systems complexity.

Shefali recommends identifying a small set of strategic customers where the combined value proposition is especially strong and working through those accounts manually while the scalable infrastructure catches up.

That creates an early proving ground. The team learns where the joint motion breaks, what customers respond to, and which pieces of the broader integration deserve priority.

Sometimes paying two reps is the better longterm play than having two competing sales teams

As Shefali discussed, shared systems solve only part of the M&A problem. Eventually, the incentive model has to support the same collaborative behavior leadership is asking for.

Imagine two sellers from opposite sides of an acquisition standing in front of the same customer. One owns the existing relationship. The other has the product or opportunity the company now wants to introduce.

Leadership says: co-sell.

But the crediting model says: only one of you gets paid.

The likely outcome is hardly mysterious.

Shefali is willing to accept an uncomfortable short-term answer here: there may be a period when both sellers need to receive compensation on the same opportunity:

While it can look inefficient through a narrow unit-economics lens, through an integration lens, this is buying enough economic safety for sellers to bring one another into deals while the new motion becomes normal.

Otherwise, the organization risks teaching each legacy sales team that collaboration threatens their earnings. And, once learned, that behavior can be much more expensive to unwind.

Start with the strategic accounts where cooperation matters most. Define the behaviors you are trying to establish. Watch whether joint coverage creates better customer conversations and commercial opportunities. Learn what the scalable crediting model needs to preserve.

Instead of asking finance to tolerate vague “double comp” during an integration, RevOps can also frame the investment around a bounded group of accounts, a transition period, and a clear commercial behavior the company needs to establish.

Use compensation to make the next stage of growth possible

The strongest thread in Shefali’s perspective is that compensation should evolve with the business.

A plan built for a product-led motion may not work once the company moves upmarket. A crediting model that worked before an acquisition may create conflict when two teams cover the same customer. Simplicity can become a constraint when the strategy becomes more complex.

This doesn't mean adding complexity every time the business changes, but rather recognizing when the existing model no longer supports the behavior the company needs.

Before changing compensation, leaders should ask:

• Are we prioritizing the right customers?
• Can the product support the motion?
• Do sellers have the skills and coverage to execute it?
• Are teams working from the same definitions and systems?
• Will the crediting model reward the collaboration the strategy requires?

Only then can compensation do its job: translating GTM strategy into operating reality without creating avoidable friction.

Listen to the full episode of The Sales Compensation Show with Shefali Raghavan for the complete conversation on GTM strategy, compensation design, PLG-to-enterprise growth, M&A integration, and the operating systems behind each.