Not a compensation consultant. Not a new plan. Not another benchmarking survey.
A structured audit framework. 38 questions that expose what your incentive structure is actually paying for — unintended consequences, sandbagging, end-of-quarter discounting, and behaviours nobody designed but everyone is rewarding.
In 2020, a RevOps Director was asked to diagnose why discounting had increased 18 points year-over-year without any change in competitive pressure.
She pulled the comp plan. Then she pulled the deal data.
The correlation was immediate.
The comp plan paid on revenue. Not margin. Not contract length. Revenue. Reps who discounted 30% to close in the quarter were making the same commission as reps who held price.
The comp plan had been built in 2018. Nobody had examined it since.
She wrote down every question the comp plan had never been asked.
Then she sent them to the Professor.
He never signed off on a commission structure without asking them first.
He will never pay on a metric without examining what behaviour it creates.
He will never mistake a commission change for a strategy change.
If you want the audit, the framework is the only way.
Everything else is gone.
The comp plan you have was designed by someone who wasn't in the room when the deals happened. It was approved by finance, ratified by HR, and communicated to the sales team. Nobody asked what it was paying for.
The behaviours you're trying to fix through coaching are almost certainly being paid for by the plan.
A 38-question audit framework across four sections. Each question carries its mechanism, what the answer reveals, and the red flags that mean the plan is producing exactly the wrong behaviour.
Dispatched to practitioners. These are their reports.
Question 4 in Section 1 — what happens when you discount to close in the last week — ended a three-year debate. The answer was obvious once we calculated it. We were paying for end-of-quarter discounting. We redesigned the accelerator. Discounting dropped 12 points in one quarter.
Section 2 — the Unintended Consequences Scan — should be mandatory at 90 days live. Every comp plan creates behaviours the designers didn't intend. Most of the time nobody looks. We found three behaviours in the first scan that were directly counterproductive. Fixed two of them mid-year.
Comp plan design is the most political conversation in a sales organisation. Everyone has an opinion. Nobody has a method. This framework gives you a method. Not to design the comp plan — that requires judgment, market data, and finance alignment. But to audit whether the plan you have is producing the behaviours you need. I ran it on our existing plan before our annual review. Found four misalignments I'd never articulated before. Two of them were responsible for the sandbagging pattern I'd been trying to address for 18 months through coaching. The issue wasn't the reps. It was the plan. We changed the plan. The sandbagging stopped.
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Every comp plan creates the behaviour it pays for. The question is whether anyone looked.— Professor Pipeline
He will never pay on a metric without examining what behaviour it creates.
He will never mistake a commission change for a strategy change.
The framework is the only way to get his thinking.
Everything else is gone.