Our Purpose
The Sales Comp Lab exists to help revenue teams build compensation systems that are fair, scalable, and trusted.
Sales compensation is one of the most powerful levers a company has. It shapes what reps prioritize, how forecasts behave, how teams collaborate, and whether performance feels rewarded in a consistent and defensible way.
Yet most organizations still manage commissions with fragile workflows, unclear definitions, and tools that make it hard to explain outcomes. The result is predictable: disputes, delayed payroll cycles, inconsistent incentives, and a loss of trust between leadership and the field.
The Sales Comp Lab was created to change that.
What We Study
The Lab researches how high-performing Sales Ops, RevOps, Finance, and executive teams design and operate modern sales compensation programs. Our work focuses on the intersection of:
- Compensation strategy and incentive design
- Operational best practices for governance and payout cycles
- Crediting rules, edge cases, and policy clarity
- Earnings versus payout timing (bookings, collections, revenue recognition)
- Commission disputes, auditability, and explainability
- Reporting systems and compensation analytics
- The role of technology in scaling compensation with trust
Our goal is simple: produce practical, clear guidance that helps teams run commissions as a reliable operating system, not a monthly fire drill.
What We Publish
We publish structured, decision-ready content that revenue leaders can actually use, including:
- Frameworks for plan design and compensation governance
- Best-practice guides based on real operational patterns
- Definitions and glossaries for common compensation terms
- Checklists and templates for policy, auditing, and payout processes
- Strategy breakdowns by go-to-market motion (new logo, expansion, renewal)
- Research-driven insights on what reduces disputes and improves rep trust
We emphasize clarity, operational realism, and measurable outcomes over theory.
Why This Matters
In many organizations, sales compensation becomes reactive:
- Plans become overloaded with exceptions
- Policies evolve after disputes instead of before them
- Commission cycles become slower as teams grow
- Finance loses audit confidence
- Reps lose trust in the numbers
But it does not have to be that way.
When commissions are designed with clear definitions, supported by governance workflows, and explained in a way reps can understand, compensation becomes a competitive advantage. It improves execution, retention, forecasting discipline, and internal alignment.
We believe compensation should be:
- understandable to the field
- predictable for leadership
- auditable for finance
- scalable for operations
Our Principles
The Sales Comp Lab is guided by a few core principles:
Clarity over complexity
If a plan cannot be explained quickly, it will not scale.
Trust is the output
The best compensation systems are designed to reduce ambiguity, disputes, and surprises.
Governance is part of the product
Commissions are not just numbers. They are a monthly operational system.
Design for edge cases
Split deals, refunds, renewals, and plan changes should be defined upfront, not solved in emergency mode.
Revenue teams win together
The best systems align Sales, RevOps, Finance, and leadership on a single source of truth.
Who We Serve
The Lab is built for:
- CROs and revenue executives
- Sales Ops and RevOps leaders
- Finance and payroll teams
- Founders scaling go-to-market teams
- Anyone responsible for building or administering compensation plans
Whether you are designing your first plan or managing hundreds of reps across multiple teams, the goal is the same: build a compensation system that drives the right behavior and earns trust.
Independence and Relationship to EasyComp
The Sales Comp Lab is an independent research branch of EasyComp, Inc. While EasyComp builds products for modern sales compensation management, the Lab’s purpose is to serve the broader revenue operations community through research, analysis, and best-practice education.
We publish with a long-term view: helping teams understand what works, why it works, and how to apply it.