Winning the Battle vs. Winning the War: Why Comp Plan Buy-In Matters More Than the Design

Caroline Rocha (Just Eat Takeaway) on Designing Comp Across Cultures, AI Myths & Comp Transparency

A 30% productivity gain from AI delivered zero more customer visits. Caroline Rocha knows a comp team that lived through that exact outcome — the hours just moved to weekends and evenings, where the sellers had quietly been working all along. Caroline is Manager of Global Services Compensation at Just Eat Takeaway, with 15+ years designing sales incentives across Brazil, Japan, and the Netherlands. She joins GoToMasters to unpack what international comp design actually looks like, and where most companies misread both culture and AI. She gets into the cultural calibration behind global comp plans, why comp can never become a black box reps can't see into, and why teams should base decisions on evidence of what AI actually does — not what it should do. If you're designing comp across markets or figuring out where AI fits in the comp function, this one's worth your time.

Why the Person Running Your Comp Plan Should Be the One Closest to the Pipeline

Daniel Wolman is Head of Incentive Compensation at Dext, the bookkeeping automation platform, where he runs comp solo across multiple regions after 15 years in ops and RevOps. In this episode, he makes the case that RevOps should own comp because they're the only function that designs for behavior rather than cost control or fairness. He walks through how Dext restructured their account management plans from a single net revenue metric to split growth and retention targets, how to spot when reps are sandbagging deals because the plan is broken, and why CSM comp is so hard to get right when the role doesn't hold a revenue number. He also covers performance management, the shelf life of salespeople, and how to run a global comp function as a one-person team.

If a Rep Switches Products Because of Comp, Your Plan Is Working Against You

Ajay Erogbogbo is VP and Head of Revenue Operations and Strategic Initiatives at Pathward, a publicly listed financial holding company, where he designs incentive comp for commercial lending officers. In this episode, he breaks down how variable comp works when it's tied to loan origination volume with two-year clawback windows, why standardizing comp across product lines creates distortion when the risk profiles are different, and how he distinguishes between a performance issue and a design issue during monthly reviews. He also covers why the biggest structural comp mistake is designing for what's easy to measure rather than what creates value, and how giving BDOs a simulator to model their earnings changes the entire plan rollout conversation.

The Comp Plan Isn't Done When It Ships: Measuring What's Actually Working Mid-Year

Ariana Farray manages 300+ payees across 40-50 comp plans at Flock Safety, one of the fastest-growing public safety companies in the US ($200M to $300M ARR in a single year, valued at $7.5B). In this episode, she walks through her full comp cycle from design through communication to measurement and course correction. She shares why pay versus performance is the report most comp teams skip, how a post-acquisition quota miscalculation led to sellers hitting their quarterly number in January, and why SPIFs should course correct behavior but never replace the plan. Plus her take on AI in comp: "It never tells anybody they have a bad idea.

Stop Running Mad Libs: What the Top 10% of Outbound Teams Do Differently

Kris Rudeegraap co-founded Sendoso after a decade in software sales, when he watched email go from effective to noise and started looking for a better way to build relationships with prospects. Today Sendoso is the leading direct mail and gifting automation platform, and Kris has spent years watching what separates high-performing outbound teams from everyone else. On this episode of GoToMasters, he and host Mike Groeneveld get into the "Mad Libs problem" — why 75% of teams are still running templated sequences that look identical — and what the top 10% are doing with AI and multi-channel to fix it. They also cover how the BDR role is splitting into two distinct profiles in 2026, what it takes for AEs to win longer enterprise sales cycles, and why personalization is what determines whether a direct mail gift lands or backfires.