Sales incentives: What your comp plan is really doing to your business

Sales comp sits at one of the most consequential intersections in building a company.

It shapes who you can hire, how long they stay, and whether the behaviour it drives actually matches the business you're trying to build. Get it wrong and you feel it in attrition before you see it in the data. Change it badly and you lose the people you most wanted to keep.

Vincent and Siobhan have navigated it from very different angles.

Vincent has spent over 15 years designing sales comp at serious scale – from Cisco, where he worked across 16,000 salespeople and a comp budget north of $1 billion, through hypergrowth SaaS at DocuSign and Personio, and now consulting across the European market on comp design for companies at every stage.

Siobhan has lived it from the operator seat. As GM at Figma and Dropbox she built and scaled sales teams through some of the most significant growth periods either company went through – making real decisions about how to attract talent they couldn't always outbid on cash, and how to hold onto people as the business changed around them. She now sees the same patterns repeat across a whole portfolio as Venture Partner at Early Bird VC.

Together they'll work through the full arc of a sales rep's journey from the comp perspective:

• What candidates are actually evaluating when they look at an early-stage offer – and what a poorly structured plan signals before a conversation has even happened
• When rep exits are really a comp problem in disguise, and what to do about it
• What happens to incentive structures when the business model changes underneath them
• What good looks like – the design choices that hold up as a business scales, and what most founders get wrong before they've had a chance to learn it

As always, there will be plenty of opportunity to ask questions, share experiences, and hear from someone who's been in the room when these decisions were made.