Optimized Incentives: Turning Unified Sales Planning into Action

This post is the second in our series on sales performance management (SPM). In our first post, we explored how unified sales planning provides the essential foundation for revenue excellence. Unified planning connects finance and sales, enabling data-driven collaboration to align forecasts, sales targets, and operational capacity. But a strong foundation is only part of the equation. To fully execute the plan and drive the right results, the focus must be on optimized incentives.

In this post, we’ll look at the benefits of effective incentive compensation management strategies. The right strategies align sales efforts with business goals, overcome frustrations with fragmented systems, and leverage the OneStream platform to drive continuous alignment and motivation.

Finance's Role in Incentive Strategy

Incentive compensation is more than just motivating sales teams. It’s also about ensuring every dollar spent drives measurable results. To do so, finance teams must ask critical questions: (See figure #1)

• Are the current incentive structures driving the right behaviors?
• How do the incentives align with gross margin goals, operational capacity, and long-term profitability?
• Can we evaluate multiple scenarios before launching an incentive program?
• Can we adapt the incentive structure based on shifting market conditions and organizational changes?

Figure #1 - 78% of CFOs

Finance leaders don’t want to wait until the end of a quarter or fiscal year to determine whether incentive plans worked. Instead, finance needs tools that test, measure, and refine programs in real-time. For example, what’s the relationship between gross margin and compensation spend? Is every incentive dollar delivering a meaningful return? (See figure #2)

Figure #2 - Sales Performance Management Dashboard

In our previous post, we highlighted how unified planning allows teams to adjust dynamically to market shifts. Incentive optimization takes that adaptability a step further, creating a seamless link between planning, execution, and results.

Frustrations with Current Incentive Solutions

Sales and finance leaders often face the same challenges when implementing incentive programs:

1. Time and resource constraints: Defining business processes, integrating technology, and meeting seasonal go-live windows all require immense effort.
2. Fragmented systems: Standalone tools for sales, finance, and HR create process variance and increase the risk of errors and the cost of collaboration.
3. Data silos: Without a unified view, teams waste time reconciling differences between what each platform is showing, and slowing down decision-making and execution.

As we discussed in the first post, patchwork systems — what we called “digital duct tape” — add complexity without delivering value. These inefficiencies are magnified in incentive programs, where errors in calculations, misaligned goals, and disconnected processes can quickly erode trust among sales teams.

Building on Unified Sales Planning with OneStream

What's the solution to patchwork systems? Leveraging the infrastructure of the OneStream platform to extend unified sales planning into incentive optimization. Finance already trusts the data in OneStream, so this approach ensures incentive programs align with organizational goals, actual results, and market conditions.

Imagine being able to do everything below:

• Automate updates to territories, quotas, and compensation plans in real-time.
• Ensure incentives are tied directly to business objectives such as gross margin growth or market expansion.
• Use actuals, projections, and scenario testing to refine incentives before deployment.

When incentives are designed using data that finance and sales both trust, the entire organization benefits. Teams stay aligned, resources are deployed strategically, and incentives drive the exact behaviors needed to hit targets.

A Real-World Example

Consider this scenario: You’re a sales operations leader at a technology company with a 400-person sales team. Based on broader organizational goals, your finance team creates quarterly targets, but your current incentive process isn’t aligned with these objectives. Sales reps focus on volume, pushing low-margin deals to hit quotas, while the business needs to prioritize higher-margin products.

With OneStream and InfinitySPM, you can integrate financial and sales data into a unified planning process. Finance sets gross margin goals, while the sales operations team designs incentives to reward higher-margin deals. During the quarter, performance is tracked in real-time, allowing you to adjust quotas or special incentives as needed.

The result? Aligned goals, improved collaboration, and better financial outcomes. This outcome isn’t just theory, either. The result is what happens when unified sales planning and optimized incentives work together.

What’s Next?

Optimized incentives ensure your unified sales plan drives the right behaviors. But there’s one more piece to the puzzle: execution. In the next post in this series, we’ll explore how effective execution based on reliable data insights turns planning and incentives into measurable business success.

Ready to eliminate digital duct tape from your incentive process? Discover how InfinitySPM on the OneStream platform transforms incentive compensation into a strategic driver of business growth.

Read more about unified sales planning here.