Interview with Matt Curl

In our Experts on the State of Incentive Compensation Management Q&A series, we’re sitting down with experts across compensation, operations, and GTM (Go-to-Market) functions to dig deeper into the insights from CaptivateIQ’s 2024 State of ICM Report, and hear their perspectives on the biggest challenges and opportunities in incentive compensation today.

Chief Operating Officer at Apollo.io (formerly at Checkr and YC-backed Five Stars), Matt Curl has spent the majority of his career leading Sales and RevOps teams.

What did you find most interesting, surprising, or insightful about the report?

I was quite surprised to find that nearly 80% of respondents felt their compensation programs met all their needs, describing them as both flexible and adaptive. While I understand that your survey primarily targeted companies with over a thousand employees, I found these results particularly intriguing. This is especially true when compared to the experiences of startups or emerging companies, where such positive feedback about compensation programs isn't as common. It was an unexpected and noteworthy finding.

What advice do you have to help compensation professionals become more strategic players versus doers?

When you’re building a comp program that’s more sophisticated than what your systems can do, that causes immense pain. If you’re trying to build really bespoke custom comp plans that have a lot of data inputs, you probably need a technologist working alongside your team to figure out how to automate it. And if you’re building complex plans with complex inputs and triggers without a technologists attached to your team, you’re going to end up just constantly exporting things from whatever system of record you’re in – you’re going  to be doing manual merging in Excel – and you’re going to be doing this by hand. That’s what I would pay attention to – what are the tasks you’re doing that are highly repetitive? Find a way to automate those, either with the right administration, the right tooling, or the right technologists.

At the end of the day, you have to pay your people, and you have to pay them how you said you were going to pay them. That is a non-negotiable. Where I’ve generally seen teams get sucked into the tactical is when that becomes a mounting pressure – and honestly, it’s the most important thing you have to do: pay people on time and pay people correctly. A lot of the folks I’ve worked with who have gotten really deep into comp, they really care about and are motivated by this. And when they just can’t quite get through it in a faster, more automated way, they end up just inundated with the pressure of having to pay people.

It comes down to two steps: the first is that you’ve got to solve that problem because even if you are strategic and you have insights, but you’re living in that world, you’re not going to have the time to solve the problem. And then the second is that you’ve got to be apprised and aware of how your business is running, what your business is trying to accomplish, what your leaders and your executive team are trying to actually do as a business. And you need to start gaining opinions about how comp can be a lever to do that – joining that strategic conversation.

How often do you recommend compensation leaders should review these metrics to gauge success and understand where they should be making changes?

I typically follow a quarterly planning process, which involves examining several key areas: Are we achieving our targets? How do we compare to the forecast? How are we aligned with our overall plan? It's crucial to assess these aspects and determine any necessary adjustments, particularly if the business's needs are evolving.

When it comes to generating compensation reports, visibility into how representatives are being paid is vital—and the more frequently this information is updated, the better. Understanding human behavior, it’s clear that people are highly interested in tracking their earnings and seeing how they evolve over time, especially within specific compensation models.

In an ideal scenario, compensation updates should occur daily, reflecting behavior or incentives that accrue every day. The key to achieving this level of transparency is automation. Rarely do we see compensation plans that are well-managed if commissions are calculated just once at the end of the quarter, delivered without errors. Instead, a daily, automated snapshot of compensation progress is a hallmark of well-run companies.

What do you think the consequences are of so few admins optimizing their ICM programs based on insights and feedback loops?

It all comes back to the strategic question, which can often seem like a vague concept, so let's break down what it really entails.

For instance, if we're designing sales compensation for our reps and account executives (AEs), but I lack a deep understanding of what our sales team is aiming to achieve—who our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is, what behaviors we want to incentivize, and what priorities are important to the VP and Director of Sales—then I can't provide a well-informed perspective. It's essential to spend time closely collaborating with the sales team to understand their goals and challenges thoroughly.

When attending those planning meetings—often held on a quarterly basis by sales leaders—it's a prime opportunity to present insights from your compensation program. You could say, “Here's how things went last quarter. Did you know that only 30% of our AEs are hitting their quota? Is this performance level what we want to sustain next quarter, or do we need to adjust our approach?”

The ability to access high-quality, accurate data, take the time to synthesize it, derive actionable insights, and then present those insights back to the team is crucial. This process is invaluable and starts with learning about those teams, spending time with them, and having access to detailed data that allows you to analyze and provide more meaningful insights than just reporting, “We paid the AEs and here's the total amount of commissions paid last quarter.”

We’re beginning to see incentive compensation planning branch out to include more and more roles across revenue-influencing teams. What challenges might companies face when trying to move to a pay-for-performance structure for other employees or the company as a whole?

The challenges arise when you take roles that are not easily distillable into metrics, and the beauty becomes in the eye of the beholder. I’ve seen comp get very distorted here, where you can have a manager who’s a very easy grader who can make very easy targets with an MBO (Management by Objectives) or pay-for-performance model and their team may get paid a lot relative to a team with a much harder judge, a different manager of a similar team. I’ve seen this happen.

I think the idea behind it, though, is correct – asking how you should incentivize your high-performing individuals who are doing orders of magnitude more than others. There are many ways to solve this.

I’ve generally found with commissions and variable incentives, the best methods are when it’s very clear, it’s pretty well-standardized, and it’s an even playing field. And you can immediately see that there are functions that are great natural fits for this. I’ve often wondered why demand gen marketing, for example, is not more often on pay-for-performance plans. There are some people that are brilliant in that function that are worth their weight in gold, and others where you can see why this is a little bit tricker to think through.

What is very fascinating is that it seems there’s this deep underlying desire to say, “If I’m a stellar performer, how can I get rewarded, too? How can I be a part of that?” I think part of this is human nature, but more traditional corporate structures historically don't lend themselves towards solving this.

We’d of course be remiss to exclude the hot topic of AI. What are your thoughts on Generative AI and its use cases within ICM?

There are numerous ways to apply commissions. In the past, I led a sales team of several hundred people, consisting of around 80 to 100 inside sales reps and about 120 field sales reps. During various phases, particularly during periods of expansion, one of my key focuses was on script adherence. Are the sales reps pitching the products in the way they've been trained? This becomes especially crucial in a scaled sales environment.

This is an important aspect, but traditionally, it hasn't been feasible to structure compensation based on this metric. For example, we can't listen to thousands of pitches and base 40% of a rep's compensation on whether they deliver the pitch correctly, adhering closely to the standard we want. Ensuring sales reps stay within the guardrails of our sales process has always been challenging to monitor in this way. However, I believe we are nearing a point where this could become a reality.

This brings us back to the importance of strategy in compensation planning. If you're not focused on understanding the evolving landscape, you're likely to miss leveraging some of these new tools and opportunities. Especially with advancements in AI, there will be new ways not only to simplify compensation explanations but also to significantly enhance how we process calls, texts, and notes with high accuracy. It’s exciting to think about how many new levers this will unlock for sales teams. This potential for innovation is truly thrilling.

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If you’re interested in participating in one of the Multiplier Q&A features, or have burning questions to ask today’s ICM leaders, let us know at multiplier@captivateiq.com.