Let’s be honest: sales performance management (SPM) is kind of a mess.
If you’re juggling spreadsheets, jumping between disconnected systems, or chasing down sales leaders for approvals, you already know the pain. But what are the alternatives? Automate this but manually manage that?
If you are planning territories in one place, managing commissions in another, and then trying to reconcile them in a last-minute scramble, you are merely building your go-to-market around misalignment, mistrust, and missed revenue.
Read more: Catch the SPM Vision with Fullcast’s Automated Comp Planning
In this article, let’s talk about the limitations of disconnected sales planning and why adopting a centralized plan-to-pay platform to support sales performance management is elevating revenue operations and sales ops to exciting heights.
The Problem: Disconnected Planning Leads To Disconnected Performance
Sales teams today are expected to move faster than ever, but their planning systems haven’t caught up.
“Smart revenue operations teams can no longer afford to separate planning from performance,” Ryan Westwood, CEO and Fullcast cofounder, said. “In today’s high-pressure sales environment—with faster GTM cycles, tighter budgets, and ever-increasing expectations—misaligned incentives or outdated comp plans put your revenue targets at risk.”
Treating commission planning as an afterthought is nothing new. “For decades, sales teams have operated under a rigid, annual planning model,” Rob Levey, GTM expert and RevOps leader, said. “Reps are assigned a territory in January, handed a quota, and then told to go figure it out—regardless of how market conditions, customer readiness, or rep performance evolve throughout the year. It’s a system built for predictability, not performance.”
Read more: Quick Fixes For Failing Compensation Plans
Despite its foundational function, commission planning is often isolated from the RevOps workflow, including territory design, quota setting, and capacity planning.
“This fragmentation can create a lot of problems for CROS, RevOps leaders, and executive teams,” Westwood said. “Overlapping territories, unrealistic goals, disputed payouts, and reps walking out the door are just a start to the problems that businesses are experiencing today. Ninety-one percent of sales teams missed their quota in 2024. That kind of operational fragility just isn’t sustainable.”
Here’s where it typically breaks down:
- Territory planning is static and often outdated by the time it’s deployed.
- Commission plans are reactive, causing frustration and confusion among reps.
- Multiple tools lead to varying versions of truth, which makes performance forecasting a guessing game.
- Manual processes introduce errors, slow down launches, and erode trust between reps and leadership.
In short, SPM is broken because it’s fragmented. And when your planning systems are fragmented, your go-to-market execution will be too.
The Fix: Centralize Territory and Commission Planning on One Platform
The fastest way to get your sales performance back on track is to centralize and automate essential functions. At Fullcast, we believe that bringing territory planning and commission planning together on a single, intelligent platform provides better operational efficiency and strategic clarity. Here’s how:
1. Align Strategy with Execution
When territory models and compensation plans live on the same platform, your sales strategy is focused and on target. No more misaligned incentives. Everyone is working toward the same goals because the system keeps it that way.
2. Automate the Admin, Focus on Impact
With the complexities of some compensation models, some may wonder where the core incentive lives. Well, it’s likely buried under distracting administrative tasks and unclear revenue goals.
Studies show that 17 percent of sales leaders admit their comp plans are too complicated for sales reps to understand. For the sales reps who try to break down the inner workings of these plans, over half (60 percent) estimate it can take them up to six months in some cases to understand variable payments from their compensation plan.
Read more: Efficiency Starts With Smarter Commission Planning
Don’t just automate for the sake of automating, automate with purpose, with revenue goals clearly in focus. “The future of efficient growth lies in dynamic, meritocratic, and connected planning—where commission plans aren’t just incentives but strategic levers to drive alignment across the business,” Rob said.
Automated workflows handle highly dynamic territory assignments, compensation adjustments, quota allocations, and plan rollouts. This gives RevOps and Sales Ops teams more time to focus on driving performance, not managing chaos.
3. React Faster to Change
Need to update territories mid-year? Adjust comp plans after a market shift? No problem and no spreadsheets are required. A centralized system lets you pivot quickly within this dynamic go-to-market environment. Fullcast is an AI-enabled, no-code sales performance management platform that provides end-to-end management of revenue operations, from Plan to Pay. With one click, changes will happen swiftly and accurately across teams, territories, and pay structures.
4. Boost Rep Confidence and Retention
When reps trust that their territories are fair and their commissions are accurate, they sell more.
Period.
“If your sales team constantly asks, ‘This seems off, how exactly do I get paid?’ or your RevOps team is drowning in dispute tickets, you don’t have a performance strategy, you have a trust problem,” warned Erik Charles, RevOps advisor and sales compensation expert.
He added that sales reps want clarity and consistency so that they can focus on close. “But that falls to the wayside with frequent ill-informed territory changes and company attempts to cut costs by manually designing a plan,” he said. “Even when firms go with automation, they are often misusing a tool they don’t understand and instead of making the tool handle a good plan – they create a bad plan that seems to work in the tool. The end result is plans that cause more confusion and erode confidence in the field.”
Transparency and timeliness in payouts build trust and drive performance, which reduces turnover and keeps your top performers engaged.
5. Create a Single Source of Truth
Do yourself (and your sales teams) a favor and ditch the spreadsheets. With a unified platform, leaders can finally get accurate, real-time insights into sales performance to determine what’s working, what’s not, and where to optimize next.
Surveys show around 78 percent of today’s companies use centralized data. Over half (64%) of surveyed companies say this strategy is more efficient, and 57% credit centralized data for business growth.
When You Fix the Foundation, You Fix Your RevOps Future
Sales performance management isn’t just about numbers. Instead, it’s about people, process, and alignment. If your team is suffering from a broken system, now’s the time to centralize, automate, and scale smarter. Because when your planning is tight, your performance will follow.
