Manager/Sr. Manager Sales Compensation Strategy

Role Overview:

The Manager/Sr. Manager, Sales Compensation Strategy is a strategic business partner responsible for leading worldwide incentive compensation strategy and the design-to-deployment process for specific business units. This role is a hybrid of traditional functions in compensation, finance, sales operations, and strategic planning, and is critical to supporting the rapid growth of Salesforce’s sales teams.

Success in this Role Includes:

• Designing incentive compensation plans that are clear, measurable, cost-efficient, and effective.
• Effectively communicating compensation design and strategy in executive-level meetings and broader sales trainings, both visually (slides, emails, and other materials) and verbally (live meetings).

Responsibilities:

This role spans both strategic and operational responsibilities, including:

• Developing compensation recommendations aligned with business objectives.
• Influencing and building consensus among leaders.
• Collaborating across teams to ensure metrics are tracked and systems are updated to ensure employees are paid accurately and on time.
• The ideal candidate should have a strong understanding of how software companies go-to-market and be able to align incentives with the responsibilities of various roles (e.g., sales development reps, account executives, industry specialists, product overlays, customer success, etc.).

Key Responsibilities:

• Build strong relationships with sales organization leadership and support teams to understand their needs and perspectives.
• Lead and improve the incentive compensation design-to-deployment process for specific business groups:
  • Identify strategic business objectives.
  • Assess the success of current incentives.
  • Propose new incentive designs.
  • Influence leaders to align on outcomes.
  • Persuasively explain new incentives to leaders and employees.
  • Project manage deployment solutions across multiple teams:
    • While another team administers the plans and updates Salesforce’s compensation systems, this role will develop a high-level understanding of these systems to ensure capabilities are considered during the incentive design phase.
  • Have courageous and candid conversations with sales leaders to address concerns and evaluate unique circumstances outside current compensation programs and policies (e.g., plan design exception requests).
  • Design temporary incentives (e.g., “SPIFFs”) to support short‑term strategic priorities.
  • Collaborate with Finance to predict the cost of incentive compensation programs and plan overall design strategy.

Desired Skills & Experience:

• 5-7+ years of experience in consulting, compensation, finance, or strategy & operations.
• Advanced knowledge of incentive plan structures (quotas, accelerators, pay mix, and on‑target earnings).
• Self‑starter with the ability to independently drive projects to completion.
• Exceptional problem‑solving skills with a demonstrated ability to structure complex problems and develop solutions.
• Expert presentation skills, particularly in building compelling slide presentations and presenting decisions to executive leadership.
• Strong project management skills and the ability to partner across functional areas (e.g., Sales, Finance, Operations, and HR).