One Framework, Many Markets: Redesigning Manufacturing Sales Comp After M&A

As manufacturing companies across sectors scale through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), integrating new business units under a cohesive global strategy is essential. However, many newly acquired sales teams operate independently—creating challenges in establishing a globally consistent sales compensation structure.

Without a global framework, organizations struggle with plan proliferation, inconsistent metrics, administrative complexity and rigid sales compensation plans that fail to accommodate evolving sales roles. These issues often result in excessive sales costs and misaligned seller payouts that do not reflect overall company performance.

Addressing these challenges requires a globally consistent, yet locally adaptable, sales compensation framework. This approach ensures alignment with corporate strategy while allowing for local market-specific flexibility.

Step 1: Define Global Sales Compensation Pay Philosophy

To begin, leadership must define the company’s core sales compensation philosophies and guiding principles that impact the sales compensation framework. This includes aligning on the company’s pay-for-performance philosophy, like pay differentiation between bottom and top performers, level of individual vs. team measurement and use of financial vs. non-financial measures.

Additionally, companies must define their sales compensation guiding principles, including:

1. Alignment to strategy and job
2. Motivational and market competitive
3. Pay for persuasion and performance
4. Simple, transparent and consistent

Make sure to provide leadership examples on how their guiding principles will impact specific plan design decisions.

Step 2: Create Global “Platform” Jobs

The second step is understanding the existing landscape of sales jobs. Leadership must identify job responsibilities across customer segments, sales process and products/services. Do not rely on job titles alone when doing this exercise. Many times, different job titles play the same role. Other times, one job title includes multiple roles.

After collecting all the roles, companies can categorize those roles into “platform jobs.” Platform jobs provide a consistent, clear view of responsibilities across markets and lay the foundation for the global sales compensation framework. These jobs also allow leaders to uniformly determine which roles should be eligible to be on a sales compensation plan.

Step 3: Design the Global Sales Compensation Framework

A best-in-class sales compensation framework strikes a balance between global consistency and local autonomy. Some plan design elements, such as plan eligibility, should be globally set, whereas other elements, such as pay level,s should be locally defined within predefined guidelines. Best-in-class leaders create a framework that distinguishes which sales compensation components are globally vs. locally defined (see graphic below).