Coming soon · Book Profile
What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation
A strategic playbook that teaches executives how to connect the corner office to the front line by aligning sales compensation with business strategy rather than treating it as a mere payout mechanism.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation reframes sales compensation as one of the most powerful levers a company has to drive profitable growth—yet one that is chronically misunderstood and mismanaged. Drawing on 25 years of consulting with Fortune 1,000 companies, Mark Donnolo shows executives how to start not with commission rates but with the big strategic questions, using frameworks like the Revenue Roadmap, the Sales Compensation Diamond, the canine sales-role metaphors (Dobermans, Retrievers, Collies), and the Reverse Robin Hood Principle for differentiating top performers. Rich with real stories from top sales leaders at companies like Verizon, Salesforce, Autodesk, and ARAMARK, the book equips leaders to ask the right questions, avoid common measurement pitfalls, set equitable quotas, motivate managers, communicate change, and get involved at the right time in the right way. It promises a clear connection between strategy and the behaviors that actually drive revenue.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A CEO or senior executive who wants to drive profitable revenue growth by making sales compensation work strategically.
- The problem
- Sales compensation is misaligned with strategy, expensive, and fails to drive the right behaviors or reward the right people. Executives feel frustrated and uncertain, sensing conflict and compromise between sales, finance, HR, and operations without knowing the right questions to ask.
- The plan
- Understand the Revenue Roadmap and align strategy before touching compensation.
- Set C-Level Goals across Customer, Product, Coverage, Financial, and Talent.
- Define sales roles and match pay mix to the behaviors needed.
- Differentiate top performers with upside and the Reverse Robin Hood Principle.
- Choose few, controllable performance measures and set market-based quotas.
- The payoff
- Compensation clearly reflects strategy and drives desired behaviors. · Top performers are the top earners and are retained. · The company hits its growth targets with a motivated, aligned sales force.
See our guide
Related profiles we’ve built
- Designing Global Sales Incentive Plans_ Step-By-Step Guide →
- Show Me the Money_ A Statistical Analysis of Commission-Based Compensation Models →
- Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results →
- Antifragile (Incerto) →
- Ben Horowitz - The Hard Thing About Hard Things_ Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (2014, HarperBusiness) - libgen.li →
- Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think →
- Blitzscaling →
- Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant →
Additional reading
- Sales Compensation Surveys (Appendix B) · Various Third-Party Providers
The book recommends using external survey data to set competitive pay levels. Appendix B provides a list of survey sources for readers to conduct their own market research.
- Software Vendors—Sales Compensation Administration Software (Appendix C) · Various Third-Party Vendors
The book emphasizes the need for automation in administering complex plans. Appendix C lists vendors that provide these solutions for further investigation by the reader.
- The Sales Growth Imperative · David J. Cichelli
Written by the same author, this book likely provides a broader strategic context on revenue growth, within which sales compensation is a key lever.
- Sales Compensation Almanac · The Alexander Group (David J. Cichelli's firm)
This annual publication provides updated data, trends, and benchmarks in sales compensation, serving as a contemporary supplement to the book's foundational principles.
- Organization Design for Performance: A Step-By-Step Guide · Cedric Ng Mong Shen
This book is relevant because 'Design' is the second dimension of organizational effectiveness discussed in Step 1. It provides a deeper framework for structuring departments and companies, which directly impacts the sales function's effectiveness.
- Designing Salary Structures: A Step-By-Step Guide · Cedric Ng Mong Shen
Directly complements the main book by detailing how to create the base salary structures upon which the incentive portion of total cash compensation is built.
- Predictive HR Analytics: A Step-by-Step Guide · Cedric Ng Mong Shen
Relevant for more advanced practitioners who want to use data analysis (as mentioned in Step 9) to test hypotheses about plan effectiveness and predict which factors drive sales success.
- The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation · Andris A. Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha, and Sally E. Lorimer
The book recommends this text as a comprehensive reference for readers who want more detail on specific approaches and analytics discussed in 'Sales Compensation Solutions'.
- The Future of Sales Compensation · Chad Albrecht and Steve Marley
The book points to this as a forward-looking resource to help readers think differently about how to design and implement sales compensation programs for the future.
- Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices · Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria
Referenced in Chapter 5 as providing a foundational framework on the four innate human drives (acquire, bond, learn, defend) that can be used to understand and segment sales force motivation.