For most Chief Revenue Officers, sales commissions present a paradox. Companies design them to be the ultimate motivator, yet they often become the source of administrative headaches, disputes, and a strategic disconnect between leadership and operations.
Drawing on a recent conversation from The Go-to-Market Podcast, we distill 20 years of B2B tech sales wisdom from Pete Shelton, Chief Revenue Officer at Fullcast. He shares a practitioner’s view on the real-world complexities of sales commission management and the path forward.
The conversation reveals a critical gap: sales leaders aim to drive strategy through incentives, but outdated processes and a lack of backend understanding create a barrier to success.
Here, we’ll explore the core challenges CROs face and offer a path for turning commission management into a competitive advantage.
“What most people don’t realize is the backend and how hard that is to administer… you’re just trying to motivate people and then you get pushed back from revenue operations because you’re breaking some of their backend processes without even knowing. I think that’s the number one challenge.” – Pete Shelton, CRO, Fullcast
Why Your Sales Commission Strategy Isn’t Working
Every sales leader’s goal is to build a compensation plan that drives the right behaviors and hits company targets. Yet, a chasm often exists between the strategic intent of a commission plan and its operational execution. This disconnect is where well-meaning incentives become sources of frustration, errors, and misalignment.
The core problem is a chasm between the strategic goals of a commission plan and the operational reality of executing it.
Balancing Strategic Incentives With Operational Reality
As a CRO, your primary objective is to motivate your sales team. You want to deploy dynamic incentives like spiffs for short-term pushes, Management by Objectives (MBOs) for strategic goals, or unique plan structures to capture a new market segment. The goal is simple: align individual motivation with company direction.
However, as Pete Shelton points out, this strategic intent often collides with a rigid and unforgiving operational reality.
“You’re just trying to motivate people and then you get pushed back from revenue operations because you’re breaking some of their backend processes without even knowing,” he explains. The risk is creating a plan that sounds brilliant in a boardroom but is too complex to administer accurately.
This leads to payment errors, demotivated reps, and a loss of trust in leadership. To build effective plans, leaders must first understand the compensation design fundamentals.
When Good Intentions Meet Bad Math
Most sales leaders never see the complex system of calculations that underpins their commission strategy. Pete notes the hidden complexity of “the math and the rules and the logic” that operational teams must manage.
For many organizations, this means wrestling with massive spreadsheets containing thousands of lines of data. RevOps and Finance teams spend countless hours hunting down figures, validating transactions, and manually applying complex commission rules.
This spreadsheet-driven nightmare is more than just an administrative burden; it’s a strategic bottleneck. The sheer complexity stifles agility. Rolling out a new spiff or adjusting a commission tier can take weeks or even months of careful deconstruction and reconstruction of formulas.
By the time the change is implemented, the market opportunity may have already passed. This complexity often starts with how goals are established, making effective Quota Management Software a critical first step.
The Critical Partnership You’re Overlooking: Aligning Sales With RevOps
A CRO’s vision for a commission plan is only as good as its implementation, and that implementation is impossible without a strong alliance with operational teams. Pete emphasizes this critical dependency: “A lot of times your initiatives can’t move forward because the people aren’t backing you that need to do this work on the backend to execute your strategy.”
Revenue Operations, Finance, and IT are the teams that translate a CRO’s strategic goals into functional reality. When sales leadership operates in a silo, creating plans without consulting the teams responsible for administering them, the result is predictable: pushback, delays, and friction.
To truly succeed, a CRO must view their relationship with operations not as a handoff but as a partnership. They must understand the backend implications of their decisions, recognizing that RevOps is your secret weapon for turning strategy into scalable execution.
The 3 Pillars of Modern Sales Commission Management
Moving away from manual processes requires more than just a new tool; it requires a new philosophy built on visibility, agility, and flexibility.
Pete’s experience rolling out a new platform at Fullcast provides a clear blueprint for what a modern solution should deliver.
A modern commission system is built on three pillars: total visibility, immediate agility, and built-in flexibility.
Pillar 1: Achieve Total Visibility to Eliminate Disputes and Build Trust
One of the biggest drains on a sales leader’s time is resolving commission disputes. The traditional process involves digging through convoluted spreadsheets, a task Pete describes as “hunting and trying to figure out what happened.”
This lack of clarity erodes trust and forces reps to become shadow accountants, wasting valuable selling time verifying their pay. A modern platform replaces this chaos with clarity, empowering reps and leaders with a single source of truth.
This transparency dramatically reduces disputes and frees up administrative overhead. For companies like Jud Whidden Consulting Inc., this level of automation has cut commission processing time by 88 percent. This is the core value of a platform like Fullcast Pay, which is designed to provide complete visibility from plan to payout.
Pillar 2: Gain Agility to Respond to Market Demands Instantly
The ability to adapt is a competitive advantage. Yet, legacy commission systems make rapid changes nearly impossible. Pete’s experience showcases the transformative power of agility.
“The day it went live, I rolled out two new plans and we were able to get it out in about an hour,” he shares.
This “same-day rollout” capability turns commissions into a true strategic tool. A CRO can launch a spiff to accelerate pipeline for a new product, create an MBO to drive a key company initiative, or adjust plans to respond to a competitor’s move, all within hours instead of months.
It’s this agility that allows the sales organization to capitalize on immediate opportunities and stay aligned with evolving business priorities.
Pillar 3: Build in Flexibility to Adapt and Scale Without Breaking Everything
For high-growth companies, change is constant. Companies launch new products, restructure teams, and evolve GTM strategies. A commission system must be able to accommodate this change without requiring a complete overhaul each time.
Pete highlights his confidence in being able to add future plans “without a bunch of backend work or breaking the current plans.” This is possible only with a flexible logic engine that can handle complex rules and adapt to new variables. This forward-looking capability is essential for scaling.
It ensures that as your company grows, your commission system supports that growth instead of hindering it. For a company like Qualtrics, having a unified platform that handles territories, quotas, and commissions is key to removing manual work and optimizing their entire GTM process.
How a Modern Platform Transforms the CRO Role
Adopting a modern approach to commission management does more than just solve an operational problem; it fundamentally changes the role of the CRO, empowering them to lead more strategically and effectively.
Adopting a modern platform frees CROs from administrative burdens, allowing them to focus on high-value strategic work.
From Reactive Administrator to Proactive Strategist
The cumulative effect of total visibility, agility, and built-in flexibility is the gift of time and focus. Instead of spending their days mediating commission disputes, untangling spreadsheet errors, and navigating operational bottlenecks, CROs are freed to concentrate on high-value activities.
They can dedicate their mental energy to coaching their teams, refining sales strategy, and accurately forecasting revenue. This strategic elevation is only possible through strong internal alignment and mastering executive partnerships with teams like RevOps.
Using Commission Data to Inform Future GTM Planning
A modern commission platform is more than a calculator; it’s a source of strategic insight. As Pete mentions, clean data helps inform future comp plans by allowing leaders to analyze which incentives drive the best outcomes.
They can identify top performer attributes, model plan changes, and understand performance on a deeper level. This data-driven approach is crucial when the 2025 State of GTM Report shows nearly 77 percent of sellers are missing quota even after reductions.
Final Thoughts
The choice for revenue leaders is becoming clear. You can continue wrestling with spreadsheets and administrative burdens, or you can elevate commissions into a tool that drives strategy in real time.
The goal isn’t just to pay people correctly; it’s to build a compensation engine that adapts to market changes, motivates the right behaviors, and gives you the agility to win. It’s time to trade spreadsheet chaos for strategic control.
Ready to eliminate disputes, launch spiffs in hours, and gain complete visibility into team earnings? See how you can automate your entire process from plan to pay with Fullcast Pay.
