Welcome to Season 3 of 10/10 GTM: The Podcast for Revenue Leaders!
Our guest for Episode 55 is Nabeil Alazzam, Founder and CEO at Forma.ai. Before founding his company, Nabeil helped Fortune 500 companies optimize their sales compensation programs, an experience that inspired him to start Forma.ai in 2016.
In this episode, Ross and Nabeil discuss using sales as a growth lever, the importance of fair and transparent earning opportunities across the sales team, and how to ensure alignment between GTM teams.
Listen to the episode here, and get the key takeaways from our conversation below.
Use sales as a growth lever
“Very few companies truly pay for performance,” says Nabeil. "When you’re thinking about using sales as a growth lever, put your money where your mouth is."
To do this effectively, Nabeil recommends designing incentive structures that align with your growth objectives. For example, a 50% attainment rep should earn significantly less, while top performers should earn three or four times what the average rep makes. By rewarding your best performers generously and paying bottom performers way less, you create a well-respected incentive system that attracts and retains top talent.
Of course, like most things, this is easier said than done. Proper execution boils down to proper quota setting. “Setting the right targets is critical because the pay curve is relative,” explains Nabeil. “If you don’t get it right, you may find yourself in a position where you’re paying a lot of reps way more than they should be making while your best reps are getting underpaid.”
Once you’ve set proper quotas, you can align accelerators with the pay curve without making the structure overly complex. This is how you use sales as a growth lever. Just as important, you need to be able to clearly communicate the pay curve to your team, otherwise they won’t understand the rationale behind it or feel empowered to achieve their targets.
Make sure earning opportunities are fair and transparent across the rep base
“What’s interesting is that when reps report a lack of transparency in their compensation structure, it’s rarely the comp plan itself,” explains Nabeil. “It’s the crediting rules tied to the plan.”
For instance, imagine you earn 5% commission on sales, but only for SaaS products — not Professional Services. "The issue arises when a deal from a particular customer segment is classified as Professional Services instead of SaaS. That’s where the confusion begins," Nabeil says.
To create a culture of fairness and transparency, reps need clarity on which part of their comp plan applies when they make a sale. “If there’s a million-dollar opportunity in Salesforce, where does it go? Does the rep get credit for the full deal, or is part of it allocated to another team because someone else, such as a product specialist, was involved? That’s the kind of complexity that undermines transparency.”
To address this, give reps visibility into the data and showing them the breakdown and the quote before they close the deal and get paid. This way, reps don’t have to guess how their commission will be calculated and can focus on driving sales with confidence, knowing exactly how they’ll be credited.
And on the fairness side, Nabeil recommends individualizing the spiff process. “When I roll out a spiff, it’s not just about rolling it out to all 1,000 sellers in the US. It’s actually about creating different spiffs and segments that gives all the parties an equal way of earning extra incremental revenue based on the uniqueness of their territory.”
Ensure incentive alignment between GTM teams
To achieve incentive alignment between GTM teams, start by mapping out the entire consumption process. As you do this, ask and answer these two questions:
- How do you compensate?
- Who owns this process?
These questions are critical because they directly influence team behavior and drive desired outcomes. When the answers are clear, it leads to better alignment between your GTM teams.
Also, avoid doing GTM planning in silos. Compensation structures shouldn’t be created by the sales team alone — you need input from product, engineering, and CS teams to drive alignment and optimize for customer experience outcomes.
“This is tailored to each business,” says Nabeil. “It comes down to the customer journey. For example, in some businesses, customer value may diminish after six months if the product isn’t consumed properly. If that’s the case, you need to heavily incentivize the first six months of the customer journey. Minimize friction early by simplifying terms and pricing, and focus efforts on successful onboarding. But that incentive structure will look very different from one where the goal is long-term consumption and growth. In such cases, incentives must align with maintaining and growing the relationship over time.”
"You’re optimizing for more variables now, which adds complexity. In the past, we could predict outcomes based on simpler models, like increasing commissions to drive more sales. But today, there are many more dimensions at play," Nabeil explains.
His takeaway? Adjust quotas more frequently, such as quarterly or biannually, to stay in sync with the dynamic nature of customer journeys.
About Nabeil
Before founding Forma.ai more than eight years ago, Nabeil worked as a sales consultant, helping Fortune 500 companies design and optimize their sales compensation and administration plans. In 2016, he launched Forma.ai, the only sales performance management platform that uses AI to automate sales incentive plan configuration and logic.
