The Future of Sales Compensation

Seth Marrs works with 5-10 companies per week to understand how sales compensation models impact performance. In this episode, Mike and Seth investigate how companies think about sales compensation now, plus how market shifts, changing demographics, and new technology are going to lead to groundbreaking transformation.  Listen to the episode to learn: How companies leverage […]

Seth Marrs works with 5-10 companies per week to understand how sales compensation models impact performance. In this episode, Mike and Seth investigate how companies think about sales compensation now, plus how market shifts, changing demographics, and new technology are going to lead to groundbreaking transformation. 

Listen to the episode to learn:

  • How companies leverage sales compensation plans to keep or attract reps
  • Why companies are shifting to quarterly quotas
  • How sales technology is going to change the foundation of sales compensation

Seth Marrs brings more than 20 years of experience leading sales operations, service operations, and marketing organizations. He excels at leveraging data, process, and technology to drive growth in organizations of all sizes and in all industries. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

Transcript
Michael McNary:

Welcome to Mimeo's Talk of the Trade. I'm Mike McNary. In addition to leading the sales organization here at Mimeo. I'm also interested in unlocking the secrets of sales and marketing. In each episode, I talked with creative leaders to find out how they approach problems like motivating sales team, structuring the revenue cycle, and getting products to market. At the end of the conversation, you and I have new takeaways to apply to our everyday life. Let's jump into today's episode. Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of Mimeo's Talk of the Trade. Today's episode is the Future of Sales Compensation. Our guest is Seth Mars. Seth is the principal analyst and research director at Forrester. Seth, it's great to have you on the pod, welcome.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, great. Thanks for having me.

Michael McNary:

Tell us a little bit about your background, Seth, for maybe folks out there who might not know you how you came to focus on sales compensation at Forrester.

Seth Marrs:

I came over in the SiriusDecisions acquisition into Forrester. And our role as as analyst was to be a practitioner, helping other practitioners do their job and improve their ways of working and as a protectioner I managed, run, and had sales compensation teams, for years, 20 plus years. So a lot of experience working with it. I've always appreciated the value of a compensation plan and being able to leverage that to drive results. So when I came in, that was an area that I decided to focus on. And it's been a lot of time now with other companies, I meet with probably five to 10 companies a week around the these areas and write a lot of research around it. So it's a give and take learning environment. But yeah, I mean, where it all came for me it was one doing it as a practitioner and to now being able to work on it over and over. It's kind of built my expertise to the point now where I do almost all of our compensation research and all of our compensation client meetings.

Michael McNaryWell, but then you're interested in what you do, right, where they say it's not a job or doesn't seem like work. Right. Exactly. So five to 10 separate companies or unique companies a week on average, that's a lot of intel to gather. Let me ask you: 00:02:01

generally speaking, do you find that in those five to 10 companies you're engaging with, there's a wide range of how folks handle sales compensation, or do you think these days there is an agreed upon practice that many organizations follow?

Seth Marrs:

I'd say for the most part, it's an agreed upon practice, there's standard behaviors or standard norms in the field of compensation that are very deeply ingrained. So that's something that's, that's interesting, especially like, I did a presentation on the future of sales compensation. And when I talk to clients, their interest in doing something radical is very low. I mean, most companies, it's about not screwing up the compensation plan more than it is about leveraging the compensation plan to really drive through performance. And that's kind of a shame. Because if you think about the biggest investment you make in trying to drive performance, sales performance in a business, is your compensation plan. Yet most companies are more, "how do I make sure I don't screw it up?" than they are, "How do I use it to be able to drive performance forward?"

Michael McNary:

Very interesting. You're right. I mean, listen, if you're if you're going to put as much money into it as you do, and it's going to be your largest line, item expense, right, tied to the driving new revenue, why not try to get it as right as you can, right and play from a position of offense versus defense? Right.

Seth Marrs:

Exactly.

Michael McNary:

Very interesting. That's an interesting take. And I wouldn't have thought that that'd be that would be the case, but I can totally understand why it is. Right.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, cuz everyone has their horror story, right? And oh, I changed my comp plan, and all my sellers are leaving, or I changed the comp plan, and we're not performing. And that is almost more disastrous than I change the comp plan, and I'm getting 3x the value that I was getting before, does it mean you have to be smart about it, what you'd normally see is companies will make very small incremental changes rather than anything big.

Michael McNary:

Yeah. And I think, you know, there's, there's some strength to that too, right? You know, if you have an established company, and that works, right. But if you need to make changes and the ROI, isn't there, right, you'd hope people would be more willing to make take a shot, right, let's and let's go for something big and try to drive those behaviors and results. That compensation is maybe one of the better vehicles to to be a driver for.

Seth Marrs:

Right? Yeah. And that definition of what works is always very blurry in compensation because it becomes a thing where if I hit my numbers, the company has their number for the year it works or it didn't work. And that's really not not the case and the market drivers that are that are pushing and pulling in a lot of directions around that. So you know, 2021 is a great example. You had just about every company go into 2021 with very conservative numbers. So I consistently see performance in 2021 as a huge outlier. Most people would think Oh, it's 2020 was a big outlier, because that's when COVID hit. What ended up happening is, those plans reset. So you did some modifications to be able to take care of your reps - good companies did - they put in ways to make sure that your sellers got paid. But then everyone went into 2021 with a real conservative plan. And then they all blew up, most companies just blew those plans away. So is that because your sellers were doing something amazing? And their compensation plan? Or is it because you were very conservative in your quota setting? And you ended up hitting numbers that were well beyond what you thought were possible? Because the market was different?

Michael McNary:

Yeah. Hey, listen, in trying to figure that out sometimes, right? You know, you can have all the data in front of you and market intelligence and determining how each factor played into the end result, right. Some people might put too heavily weighted importance on oh, what our comp plan did to drive this or, you know, in maybe not enough importance, or factoring in the the impact of economic trends or like you said, a comeback year, like 2021, when everyone was kind of not wandering, not knowing what was going to happen, but was not as bullish as they probably would have been if there had been no pandemic, right.

Seth Marrs:

I think a lot of cases, that's one of the things that I talk about with clients is not so much focusing on that. But this you're playing correlate to results, because you see a lot of problems with that, where your plan is going up incrementally faster, or going down incrementally slower than your company's growth. If that's happening, that's what most comp organization should be focusing on as you should have a direct correlation or very close to a direct correlation to we do really well, sellers get paid really well, company makes a lot of money. The problem is when I see real big problems in comp plans, or you see this often in businesses that are growing, growing, growing and starting to plateau...it's almost universal, where you'll see the comp plan, percent payments continue to go up at a disproportionate rate compared to the company's growth. So as growth plateaus, sellers start making more and more and more, which is that's where you have a comp plan problem. If it's not correlated, then you've got a problem. If you can correlate it, then you're going to be fine, because sales are going to be in line with what you pay. If it's not correlated, that's where you get that call from finance that says, "Why is why are sales expenses so high? What's going on?" You really, you really want to be ahead of that conversation.

Michael McNary:

Yeah, I hear that. And do you think that that's the case, because folks have maybe an established group of sellers that they trust to, you know, position their product and drive results? And they believe that they've got to continually drive improved compensation scenarios for them, even if it's out of line with a company growth model?

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, it's weird, right? Because you would look at it and say, Oh, I mean, how's that even possible, most sellers are paying on sales. So sales are going up. So there's, they're gonna make more, but when you dig into the nuances of it, there's a big difference. For example, a good one that's happening right now is a lot of a lot of manufacturing companies pay off bookings. So right now, you may have sellers that are new, or booking a lot of business, but their supply chain is so far behind, it could be up to a year behind. So now all of a sudden, you've paid all these sellers for bookings. And now your your deliveries are a year out. So now you've got a problem. That's a macro one. But you see that constantly the way you make the way you structure the plans. And when you pay how you pay? What does it look like how accelerators work? Accelerators cause major gaps in in payment...all that stuff leads to, in a lot of cases, disconnected plans from performance. And that's the that's the part you really have to eliminate. If they're correlated fine. But if they're not, you've got problems.

Michael McNary:

Yep. Yeah. Imagine, especially if they persist long term. Right? That That makes a lot of sense. And I've seen it, I've seen it happen both ways. So I can certainly relate to that. So let's talk a little bit about some general trends in sales compensation today, right? There's a lot going on the world. Right? You know, we have maybe some pending recession. But this is coming on the heels of a very hot job market, we've got inflationary pressures and how that's impacting the labor market, there's a lot of different things. So, you know, let's start with this. Traditional sales comp is focused on, you know, monetary incentives, and usually fixed and variable, right. And then things like, you know, rewards like President's Club trips, and maybe some fringe benefits. You know, what about that model is or isn't cutting it in today's market?

Seth MarrsYeah, there's a lot of change happening with it, but it's all not changing necessarily compensation plan. So there's another factor in this which is millennials coming into the market and millennials value other stuff. A little bit more than, say boomers did, right, where it was kind of brass tacks, here's what I need to deliver, and I go deliver it. There's, there's a lot more opinions when it comes into to younger people coming into the market, which has positives and negatives. So how they feel about the company they work for matters a lot more than it used to. So you have to have a great culture. That sounds pretty obvious, but it gets ignored very often in sales, where it's like, "I'm gonna pay you a lot of money, you do what you do, what you need to do." That's that's what this is about. The biggest trend that I've seen coming out of with this job market heating up which now it's it's starting to, you're starting to see potentially some cooling is a lot of conversations around, "should I increase my base pay?" because what you had are companies coming into the market desperate for employees and going against their business strategy and over hiring or hiring for more than they should be paying for a role. Because they're desperate to have someone one of the ways they did that was increasing base, that's going to have wide ranging impacts. Because the more you're paying a high base to a hunter type rep, whose sole job is to build create new business, that there are ramifications to that in terms of complacency and motivation. And the value that the variable part of their their pay gives them like what matters... If you're getting a very high base and a very low variable, then your your motivation to go after - through compensation, to be motivated through compensation - to go after more deals goes down. And that's why you, you set these things up where you can give them more motivation, it's usually risk-reward, right. But now with the market the way it is, you're seeing companies give in on that and start to pay a higher, higher base. And that's been a trend that's been happening over time. You will never come across companies that are paying 100% variable anymore. That used to be the case, it's not the case anymore. I mean, right now, super aggressive plans. 50-50: 00:09:46

50% base, 50% variable. But even that's getting challenged in this market, where people are losing reps very quickly. Yeah.

Michael McNary:

It's interesting, so and so on the base. So just to jump in, you know, on the in, there's a few, you know, you mentioned a few downsides of the the high base, but then it's got to extend your pay off period for that rep. Right? When they start to become profitable, right, if they have too much fixed, you know, dollars tied to their, their comp model. Furthermore, what do you do in two years when they're, you know, ascending, right, now, all of a sudden, you've created a higher baseline, that, you know, you're just setting yourself up for much higher wages in two, three years, if you want to keep top talent.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, and the risk is high, right. So imagine in this environment where you're starting to give the seller as more and more base market factors play a role in your ability to hit a quota. So as a seller, if you have based variable and you're hitting 100% of your quota doesn't matter at all, right. But if you have a downturn, and everyone's hitting 90, 85% of their quota, that rep becomes significantly more expensive than a rep that you have on a 50-50 base. So you have to ...Companies are being forced to make that decision and take that risk. And they will pay dearly for that as as things turn a little bit. And it'll be interesting, a lot of the guidance that that I have with clients is how do you manage that effectively, to make sure you're fair, but not just fair to to a seller, because you're desperate for more sellers, what is fair to the company so you both can win. And in some cases, that's fine. And it makes sense. In other cases, you're really putting your company at a disadvantage by making that change. Right.

Michael McNary:

Totally understand that. And so let me ask you this. And it kind of goes back to one of the earlier points that we were talking about, you know, this is competitive labor market, right, where people are increasing basis in order to attract talent, right, which creates some of the myriad issues we just talked about. But then, you know, we talked about using compensation models and changing compensation models to be competitive and drive better results. Or people may be even more hesitant to make changes right now because of the competitive of the job market, outside of you know, the increased basis to attract new talent. What about the legacy talent, right? Are people kind of standing firm because they don't want to rock the boat? Or are they doing similar things with a legacy talent where they're trying to make it more attractive in order to keep the talented they've had for maybe short or medium term?

Seth Marrs:

The biggest thing that I see is companies are trying to figure out how do they accurately... how do they accurately reward talent. Because what I see in a lot of cases is right now there's an overpayment, not just not just from the perspective of you know, what you're on target earnings is your base versus variable, but what because of 2021 on some of these shifts, most companies are looking going, "Why am I paying so much?" Because in in a lot of cases, they're their average sellers at 110% of plan. And they're wondering why they're spending so much money on their sellers. So to a certain extent, they're trying to find sanity in their forecasting. So I'm seeing trends happening where companies are going, "forget it. I'm not going to forecast annually anymore, I'm going to... or I'm not going to give quotas annually anymore, because with a quarterly quota, I can at least see three months into the future and be able to accurately assess" Now they build out an annual plan, but then they assess it quarterly and only give the seller quarterly number. And it allows them to better align to what reality is in the markets. You're seeing things like that to focus on, how do I become more accurate, and what is a fair number to give the seller or that's the biggest I've seen in this because it's gone haywire in the last two years, and companies are trying to figure that out. And to a large extent, that's a really good thing. Because why on earth were you giving annual plans to begin with. I mean, to a certain extent, that company's ability to forecast an annual number is horrendously poor, especially when you get down into the rep, the rep level, like when you go down to a rep, a company's ability to accurately quota reps in their territories, the success rate is incredibly low. It's like drawing it back and giving yourself visibility and allows you to set a fair quota. And ideally, that makes it a fair number for the rep to hit and a fair number for the company to reward that rep. And I love that because it's actually taking a part of the business that people are scared to change and doing some pretty innovative things.

Michael McNary:

That's interesting. I like a few takes there, whatever you're doing with your comp, you've got to make it a win win for the org and the individual. Right? If it's used in one direction or the other. It's going to be bad news. Right? And then furthermore, listen, get creative. Think about the uncertainty the market and maybe think about quarterly compensation plans versus annual, right? Why not even give it? I don't see a lot of downside if you get your your team members to buy in, right?

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, I mean, the hard part is most organizations can't even pull together their quotas and run them. It takes them four months to put together their annual... five, four or five, six months to put together their annual quota numbers. So what you're seeing as well as there's going to need to be a lot more agility when it comes to executing compensation, and planning in a faster manner. And that in those companies who for years have been on an annual race track of you know, this is when we do our planning is when we do this, it really disrupts that for especially for enterprise organizations, they struggle to make that change, because in a lot of cases, it takes them a month and a half just to figure out how to pace on, let alone how to change quotas to adapt. But that's, that's gonna have to adjust. If you want to make the most of all this money you're spending, you can make a very strong argument, it's worth the investment in becoming more agile.

Michael McNary:

Foor sure. I totally agree, Seth. And furthermore, right, like the idea of quarterly compensation model is that the risk is mitigated to some degree, right? You are right, taking a three month bet versus a 12 month bet, where the variability of your expectations is probably going to be less than on a annual basis with a strange or unique market conditions. And, you know, inflationary pressures and some of the other things that we're seeing, right, take two or three months,

Seth Marrs:

as long as companies remain committed to the balance between the seller and the end the company, right, because what a lot of sellers would say is "aw man, that means if I do good Q1, I'm gonna get screwed in Q2"

Michael McNary:

That's exactly what they'll say.

Seth Marrs:

you're gonna have to figure that out. To say, "this is what balance is," and you're gonna have to make sure - this is something that's come up a lot, that I've done a lot of research on is - you've got to get away from who hits quota, who doesn't hit quota. You have to start looking at your distribution. You got to make sure if you make that commitment that at the end of the year, if you want to 20% of your reps to be in excellence and make a certain amount of money in excellence, and a certain amount of 15-20% to be in threshold, you're gonna have to adjust not based on individual sellers hitting their numbers, you're gonna have to adjust based on the distribution to make sure that at the end of the year, you have 20% of your reps hittinh excellent. Because sellers don't sell in a group. Very rarely do they sell, "Everyone sells 100%. And we're all going to be right at 100% and distributes." So if you can hold with those numbers, that's your way to stay fair because at the end of the year, if you still have 20% of your reps, hitting their numbers, and hitting those excellence numbers and making really good money, you've been fair to the reps, they've been fair to the company, and it actually makes it a lot more fair because now you don't get the one guy who has a bluebird comes up blows their number out and now they've they've hit their number for the year that takes everyone else's numbers down. So you can do adjustments to really to make it fair for all reps and make sure that there is... the rep that performs from beginning to end actually makes the best money. Yep. You don't want someone to fall into a top, you know, into that excellent stuff where you want the reps who deliver day in and day out to get that money.

Michael McNary:

Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. So plus 100 for that answer, Seth. Let's talk about, you know, going back, again, to kind of some of the introductory statements and conversation we're having. So millennials entering the job market, right now, a lot of those millennials are landing in the area of, you know, for many sales organizations highest importance, and, you know, we'll say, highest interest as well, which is top of funnel, right? Pipeline creation, sales, development, or business development teams, you know, depending on what order you're talking to. So what are maybe some trends that you see in changing the way that top of funnel or pre sales teams are incentivized? We've talked a little bit about revenue. What about the folks driving pipeline?

Seth MarrsYeah, this is a really interesting area. I think it's a use case for the future on what's going to happen. And because what you're seeing in high-performing top-of-funnel BDR SDR teams is payment based on getting a getting a customer to a certain point in the pipeline, right. Actually, to a certain extent, getting them into the pipeline where a seller accepts them. That creates a lot of challenges. Because this is from a compensation planning standpoint, that is completely foreign to most companies, most companies are so scared of overpaying a rep or not just scared, but they've actually dealt with overpaying reps for things that were that didn't lead to sales, that they just won't do it. But you kind of have to because a BDR is not responsible for closing a deal, it's their responsibility to give a qualified opportunity to a seller at a level that everyone agrees is qualified enough that the seller should be able to close it at a reasonable percentage that you would see in their typical pipeline. That's very odd. So what you're seeing now is those sellers getting rewarded based on qualified opportunities based on meeting set, based on number of contacts, which has traditionally been really bad for sales, because it's really easy to manipulate that. And I think you see a lot of that happening in this space. Because if a seller doesn't have any responsibility, that opportunity and they have a buddy that's a BDR, they'll accept everything, they can hit their number, pushing stuff over, so you have to build rules around it, but we're seeing a lot of companies have success with it. And there's another trend on the sales tech side, which I think is going to over time really push into this and make it a lot more viable, which is... and this is an area another area of research that I work on very heavily... is getting a seller out of the activity. So getting sellers out of the forecasting game, they no longer... their data is so visible and what sellers are actually doing... the idea of having them document what they're doing and them tell you what they're going to sell is not not where things are going. Eventually you could be able to understand all the things happening within a deal better than a seller because the seller only sees the parts of the deal they're working on. Now right now that's better than then most other people. And in the past, you couldn't see that. But nowadays, you have the ability to see 80 plus percent of the interaction the seller has with the buyer, not just the seller, but the entire selling team: 00:21:11

marketing has with their buyers in the buying cycle. Once that flips, and it's progressing, the technology's there, but the buy-in isn't and it's gonna keep progressing. The minute that a seller doesn't enter activities and the minute that you don't rely on a seller or a sales team for forecasting, what you'll see is, "hey, I've qualified these 20 deals, I expect you to close 60% of them, close to 60% of them, let us know how you can help and I don't want you entering anything. I don't want you I don't want you forecasting anything, you put all of your energy in closing those deals." Once that happens you've eliminated their ability to manipulate what happens because you're just capturing the interactions they're having with their buyers. And you can start paying them earlier. Think about it... Today you're paying based on an outcome that's already happened. So once the deal closes you pay, which is great to make sure your dollars match with your commission payments. Yeah, not really a great way to figure out what's going on in a deal and to be able to course correct or to be able to see that this stage when this when this question comes up 80% of the time, if you give the right answer they close 20% of the time and you get the wrong answer or if you don't get that answer they lose 84% of the time.

Michael McNary:

Yep.

Seth Marrs:

If you understood that, and you can accurately monitor it without manipulation, that's where you want to pay your seller. You don't want to pay them at the end result, the end results, the easy part, if you've done all the hard stuff during the sale, the problem has always been, you can never accurately document or pay off that because it's easily manipulated, and sellers will figure that out real quick. But if you can remove them from that, which it's getting more and more possible to do it. Now, yes, start paying, you're gonna start paying them like a BDR is paid today, but you're gonna see that payment that that process go all the way through the sales process through the buying process.

Michael McNary:

That's really, you know, what, I have never thought about that possibility. And so just to kind of, you know, parrot back to you how I'm understanding this. So the advent of, you know, tools like Gong, Chorus, and salesloft and outreach, and obviously, the CRMs. You know, we're getting to a point where our visibility, and the transparency between prospects and sales, interactivity is almost 100. Right, or it's approaching it in a way that it never has previously. Right. So with that, you know, eventual sale, we get full visibility and transparency to the point where we can take them out of the forecasting the, you know, inputs that it takes to monitor and drive sales administratively, and effectively, we might be able to comp them at different moments of the sale, because we'll have intelligence as to what sort of actions at those moments will lead to better way of results.

Seth Marrs:

Exactly. And I think about that the only thing in the way of that is adoption. And now that's going to... it's ...you're... it's one of those weird things, right, you would think if you go to a seller and say, "Hey, I don't ever want you to enter another activity, I don't want you to do any forecasts, the only thing I want you to do is go interact with your customers, just go sell to your customers, and then do the best you can there." That's all I want for that, they would love that. But what you hear is on the here's the other side, "we're going to capture all your phone calls, we're going to capture all your emails, we're going to capture all the interactions, and we're going to put them in the opportunity visible to anyone that we want to have see it and we're going to analyze and understand what's going on." So they're all in on not doing anything, but the visibility of their interactions scares people, they think that it's you know, big brother or whatever, that that the company cares so much about them that they're going to be looking at close. And in a lot of cases, that's just not true. It's going to be behind the scenes looking at the macro view and trying to find insights, let the seller sell. And the beauty of that is when that happens. Your seller who could figure out how to manipulate their way to plan or manipulate their way to President's Club will disappear. And your best sellers, the people who truly make a difference for your company that truly add value will emerge. As the people who are making a difference... and they'll, you'll start... it'll... it'll make pay equality, a reality. Today, there's a lot of ways for sellers, especially really good sellers that understand how systems work to manipulate those systems to be able to get them into position, you point that out, now you have the best sellers doing it. And I think that actually when you look at going back to kind of the generations, Millennials don't care as much about recordings, all that stuff, that's a boomer type thing, or GenX.

Michael McNary:

Couldn't agree more.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, so they're going to be a lot more open to... so you have that inertia on your side as well, to a certain extent, they're going to be asking for it. Once that happens. Now that that's where things will change. Now it's a big change. It's it's one of those things where companies are going to have to actually tell a seller, "I'm sorry, we're doing it, we're gonna listen to you on any issues and try to address it. But every one of you interactions is going to be tracked. And, and we believe that in six months time, you're going to not want it any other way." And we have examples of that actually happening. But you have to be strong enough to stand up to your best rep. And that is something that most sales leaders really struggle with. The last thing they want to do is upset their top seller and have them leave because you're capturing their interactions. It just doesn't matter that much to them in today's environment, and I have to close a deal right now. So you're gonna need some inertia. And I think with millennials in the tech environment starting to embrace this. My hope is you'll start seeing that push forward.

Michael McNary:

Listen, I'm not kidding when I tell you that you just blew my mind. Because I have not thought about the problem in that way. And I think about this problem quite often. And to think about the potential of this technology in that way. You know, I think I you know, when I think about how it's leveraged today. And I think about some of the potential it's more in immediate utility. Right, you know, hey, if we had this tool that could help us do this, but that is a truly overarching change that could be transformational, right, and sales compensation, if we start incenting, and rewarding, different areas of the process based off of this complete in, you know, accurate intelligence that we have about results in actions and how they kind of married together. Wow, yeah, very interesting.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, I mean, the it's, it's a ways out, right, you have to get that buy in and support that. The great thing about it is all the technology is there. Now it needs to be interweaved and solve some other problems. But it's the real case where AI can make a difference in, in sales. And in closing more business, like it's a it's a legitimate use case, but you've got it. The hard part is how to how do companies say I'm bought in and I'm going to make this happen? So you're gonna have to do that you're gonna say, come hell or high water? I'm making this happen. Let's go do it. Yeah. And it's all there for the taking right now.

Michael McNary:

I got to tell you, I'm so appreciative of you coming on the pod, and, you know, sharing this immense, supreme, you know, awareness around what's happening in the market where the market is going. If I was to kind of sum up some of the takeaways for our listeners, you know, I'm hearing from you that the way to be is to think about compensation as an offensive tool, use it to drive better results, be innovative, to get an incentive, right behaviors from your sales organization, versus being defensive to maintain the status quo, or save yourself from potential disaster, right? Thinking about the worst case is not the best way to go about this, right, think about the best case and work towards that. Furthermore, you know, no matter what's happening in the market, if a company is going to divert them their strategy from being one where it's a alignment between org and individual, it's going to lead to problems in the near term, but also down the road, right? Throw your cost of sale out of whack, when you realize profitability against a stakeholder? And also what is their incentive to drive net new business if most of their compensation is secure, and guaranteed, right? And then finally, listen, technology could create a very different future in sales, compensation, right? All of these tools that we have, and that we're using for, you know, maybe maybe some are thinking about this in this holistic way. But I think many are thinking about them in siloed ways, right? Hey, Gong gives us recording, SalesLoft gives us you know, outreach insights and capability to customize our outbound messaging. And then the CRM collects all this data and tells us where our pipeline is, etc, you get it, I think about those as a, you know, beginning to end future where the tech can drive, how we incent how we reward, and when we reward is very, very unique thinking. And I listen, I'd like to see where this goes. Because I think that could lead to some very, you know, a win win scenarios for both sellers and organizations. So how was that for summary? I mean, did I, you know, kind of capture some of the the overarching points up?

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, I mean, that's it. I mean, I think the biggest, the only other thing I'd add is great comp plans and great compensation works well, when both the seller and the company are successful, if they're built that way, and you can ensure success. And when the seller, the seller, I think some of the caveats on that as the seller that is truly making a difference with the with it with the buyers and influencing deals versus the seller has figured out a way to make it look like they're influencing the deals. Right. But totally, then that's a successful plan.

Michael McNary:

Yeah, well said. Hey, so Seth, if our listeners wanted to get in touch with you, how could they reach you?

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, they can. LinkedIn is looked me up on LinkedIn. Would love to connect.

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