Case Studies
Part 1: Strategy, Design & Governance
Engagement: Multi-phase transformation program | Enterprise SaaS
Services: Compensation plan design, role architecture & career pathing, quota methodology, lead routing optimization, incentive compensation management platform selection, governance design, legal documentation, global enablement & change management
Written by
Carmen Olmetti
This is Part 1 of a two-part case study. Part 2 covers the incentive compensation management systems implementation: how RevEng translated the strategic decisions described here into a fully configured platform, managing simultaneous plan rollout and system migration under an aggressive timeline.
A global SaaS platform with hundreds of thousands of customers across more than 150 countries was entering its new fiscal year with a compensation program that had become unsustainable. Years of incremental adjustments had produced a patchwork of individual commission rate plans, ad-hoc kickers, and one-off structures that were administratively complex, inconsistent across segments, and misaligned with the company’s go-to-market strategy.
The most visible symptom was a mid-sized inbound sales team: sellers functionally closing deals yet classified and compensated separately from the broader account executive organization. But the issues ran deeper. Quota attainment distributions were bimodal, pointing to structural territory and quota-setting problems rather than talent gaps. Lead routing logic did not reflect deal complexity. Overlay role compensation was misaligned with the core selling motion. And the absence of a governance framework meant every new role or exception triggered ad hoc plan creation, compounding the problem with each cycle.
Structural Root Cause Analysis
RevEng conducted structured interviews across Sales Operations, HR, Legal, Finance, Enablement, and frontline teams spanning multiple global regions. A critical finding reframed the entire engagement: deal size, not geography, was the strongest predictor of sales outcomes. The company had organized territories and routing around regional boundaries, but deal complexity was what actually drove conversion and cycle time. That insight, combined with evidence that low-quality lead sources were distorting conversion rates and that bimodal attainment reflected quota-setting problems rather than talent gaps, shifted the work from a comp plan redesign to a broader structural overhaul.
Unified Pay-for-Performance Architecture
RevEng replaced individual commission rate plans with goal-based bonus structures (100% attainment = 100% of target incentive) for every revenue role. Account executive plans introduced a tiered performance curve with accelerators up to 3x above quota. A bridge plan for the inbound sales team preserved earnings stability while introducing pay-for-performance mechanics, with roughly two-thirds of affected reps modeled as neutral-to-positively impacted. Pre-sales specialist and partner plans were each restructured to align with their respective selling motions.
A Consolidation Path That Preserved the Team
The inbound sales role could sit within the broader account executive job family without requiring identical functions, the same way entry-level and senior account executives operate at different levels of deal complexity. RevEng developed a 12-competency model across four domains that provided objective transition-readiness criteria and identified specific blockers to resolve before any individual moved into the full account executive track.
Governance and Legal Simplification
RevEng designed a governance framework using the RAPID (Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide) decision model, leveraging the client’s existing compensation review board rather than creating new committees. Legal documentation was restructured from fragmented individual letters into a three-document architecture (universal terms and conditions, standardized plan documents, and short-form addenda), reducing annual administration from full contract re-execution to a brief update across all applicable jurisdictions.
Compressed Global Rollout Under a Year-End Deadline
RevEng supported incentive compensation management platform selection, securing meaningful annual cost savings through vendor negotiation, and sequenced the implementation so upstream data architecture work was completed ahead of the implementation partner’s build window. A three-phase cascading rollout was compressed around a year-end legal notification deadline: manager preparation, leadership cascade across multiple regional sessions, and system go-live in the opening weeks of the new fiscal year. The systems build itself is covered in detail in Part 2.
Uncovered that the compensation problem was actually a structural problem.
The engagement began as a compensation redesign, but the diagnostic work revealed that the real issues sat upstream: territories drawn around geography instead of deal complexity, routing that sent complex deals through transactional channels, quotas built from financial planning assumptions rather than ground-level capacity, and an inbound team carved out as a separate function when it was really a different point on the account executive career continuum. Fixing the comp plans without addressing these structural issues would have produced a better-looking program that still underperformed.
Gave the organization a single, unified compensation framework.
One-off plans were consolidated into 12 standardized goal-based structures. Every revenue role now operates under a consistent pay-for-performance philosophy with transparent mechanics and quarterly measurement. The bridge plan, combined with the competency model, gave leadership a clear path to consolidate the inbound team into the broader account executive organization without forcing an all-or-nothing transition.
Built governance and legal infrastructure to sustain it.
RevEng designed clear RAPID decision rights, an email-based exception process, a repeatable annual review cycle, and a three-document legal architecture that turns what had been quarterly re-execution exercises into routine administrative updates. Every piece was built for the client’s lean operations team to run without outside help.
Delivered analytical assets the operations team still uses.
Statistical findings on routing logic, conversion distortion, and attainment distributions became standing tools the Sales Operations team uses for ongoing quarterly optimization, making the diagnostic durable well beyond the engagement.