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You’re the one everyone calls when plans change and payroll's expected to run shortly after. ��
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You’re translating finance constraints into field motivation, soothing shadow accounting flare-ups, and somehow still expected to spot the next GTM lever before Q4 hits. ��

But, career-wise, maybe you're starting to want more than the “comp administrator” label. You want an even bigger seat at the table, and a line of sight to VP one day, without sacrificing trust, accuracy, or your sellers’ livelihood.

This desire to transition from admin into strategy roles is why this particular Sales Comp Career Week session resonated so well. ��

Kristina Plane (Sales Compensation Strategy & Planning at Cisco), Justin Rosenblum (Director, Commissions Transformation, from Thomson Reuters), and Shawn Rossi (VP, Strategic Services, here at ˮ��ֱ��.ai) didn’t debate admin vs. strategy as opposing camps. Instead, they showed how each side powers the other—and how to turn your current seat into a launchpad for growth. ��

Below we've distilled highlights of their conversation.

If you want the full replay (and a few fun anecdotes), catch the on-demand recording and the clips we’ve curated in this recap.

Our speaker's advice? Define the work first, then choose your career path

In terms of the your long-term game plan, start with the actual choice of role type in front of you. I.e.:��understand the difference between comp admin and strategy roles and why you'd pursue one or the other.

‍When Shawn asked the panel to define each typical path, they drew a clean line between two typical comp role mandates—both necessary, and both influential when done well. ��

It's notable our speakers started with the work—not the labels. As they put it: ��

Comp administrators run the business and protect trust. In this role you:

• Own plan & coverage set-up, on-time statements, >99% accuracy, and dispute resolution.

As Justin shared admins are the "guardians of trust". In this role you keep sellers focused on selling by resolving issues fast.

Comp strategists work to change the business, and focus on shaping behavior. In this role you typically:

• Look ahead to where the business is going and align comp accordingly: plan design, measure feasibility, scenario modeling, and outside-in sensing (what peers are trying, AI trends). ��

• You're orienting comp to the next phase of growth, not just this quarter’s plan.

Choosing between the two paths often comes down to the problems you want to own right now. ��

• If you thrive on clear outcomes, SLAs, and direct field contact, admin gives you a tangible scoreboard and daily impact. ��

• If you’re drawn to ambiguity, trade-offs, and shaping behavior through incentives and data, strategy may feel like home. ��

But whichever lane you select, you’ll advance faster when you understand the other side’s constraints.

And let's not forget about the perception layer.

Interestingly, during this session we had a question come in from the audience about a common idea that admin may be considered “reactive” while strategy is somehow “fancier.”��

But our experts largely rejected this framing. ��

As they shared, whether the function feels reactive depends on org maturity (clear RACI, data quality, reporting transparency). And they cautioned that “fancy” strategy can sometimes ignore feasibility, which ultimately can break trust:

Kristina and Justin insisted that the modern admin remit is proactive: you need to be automating repeat work, instituting preventive audits, and pushing for transparent reporting so reps can self-serve. This lean toward proactivity is what will ultimately earn you a strategic voice in design.

The advice? Major in one, minor in the other

• If you’re coming up through admin, deliberately build design literacy and executive storytelling so your track record of accuracy converts into influence in the planning room. ��

• If you’re coming up through strategy, cultivate implementation empathy—translate bold ideas into clean requirements, stable data sources, and reports that won’t spike disputes at launch.

As you document wins, upgrade your narrative from tasks to outcomes. On the admin side, point to sustained >99% accuracy, published SLAs, and measurable reductions in dispute volume driven by prevention and transparency. On the strategy side, highlight where you replaced a noisy metric with a cleaner proxy, modeled cost and behavioral impact, and simplified launch communications to speed comprehension. ��

This shift—from activity to impact—is what hiring managers and promotion committees ultimately reward.

To grow, build your credibility flywheel

To move from “implementer” to “influencer,” you need to build tangible influence that leadership can feel. Which all begins with accuracy and reliability. ��

In other words: statements land when promised, calculations are right the first time, and edge cases get handled with empathy. All of these moments compound into trust with the field and with cross-functional partners.

Trust becomes influence when you can effectively translate across Sales, Finance, and Systems without losing the plot. ��

Here, Justin noted storytelling as a skillset is often “severely underrated” because it’s how a data pull becomes a decision: a clear narrative about behavior, cost, and risk. Shawn further added that empathy with the sales force—really hearing what created confusion or friction—earns you the right to come back with simplifications that stick.

Over time, the pattern looks like this: accurate operations reduce shadow accounting; reps spend more time selling; leadership starts asking for your view in design sessions; and then your recommendations land because they’re grounded in data and in the lived experience of the field. ��

Overall, keep feeding the flywheel with public SLAs, dispute taxonomies that reveal root causes, and quarterly reviews where you present prevention wins alongside design ideas.

‍Use your admin evidence to earn a seat at the design table

As our panelists made clear, the fastest bridge from analyst to strategist is paved with evidence.

Start by mining your own queue: dispute logs, timing issues, measure-level questions, and attainment patterns. Where did a measure actually move behavior? Where did latency or data quality erode trust? Package these insights in short readouts that separate signal from noise. Further, ask to be the “fly on the wall” in straw-model and cost-model sessions.

Additionally, when a comp proposal initially feels impossible, resist the reflexive “no.” Kristina’s advice was to pause, clarify the intent, and return with a feasible version—a simpler proxy, a different data source, or a phased rollout—along with the admin, reporting, and rep-comprehension implications. This posture turns you from the person who reconciles the past into the operator who helps shape the future.

Below, Kristina and Justin walk through the skillsets needed that speed this pivot—from trend mining to getting invited into planning:

Where sales comp should sit in the org (and how its placement can shape your ceiling)

This theme around org structure surfaced from a sharp audience question: “Where should Sales Comp live in the org?” After all, where the function sits will determine how you juggle real trade-offs between responsiveness to the field and alignment to Finance and HR.

All three panelists had “lived” the function from different boxes—HR, Payroll, Sales, and Sales Ops/RevOps—and what emerged in the discussion was the importance of proximity—to the field’s reality and to fiscal guardrails—as the factor that determines when you learn about change and how early you can shape it.

For example, sitting exclusively in HR or Payroll can over-optimize for policy and process while placing you downstream of GTM decisions.

In other words, you find out late and spend cycles reacting.

Embedding directly inside Sales keeps you close to sellers but can flood the team with day-to-day questions and pull you out of cross-functional governance.

The “middle ground” (RevOps/Sales Ops or Sales Finance) consistently seemed to offer the best vantage point: close enough to hear product and coverage shifts in real time, close enough to Finance to model cost and margin impact, and central enough to broker trade-offs before decisions are set in stone.

This logic only strengthens when Sales Performance Management expands beyond comp to territories and quotas. At this point, RevOps is the natural home because quota setting, coverage, and pay mechanics operate as a single system; feasibility, data contracts, and reporting definitions can be negotiated once rather than patched three times after the fact.

From a career standpoint, placement of comp in the org shapes your ceiling because it shapes your line of sight. Too far from GTM, you become an elite firefighter. In the middle ground, you become a shaper: in the room for straw-model design, cost modeling, and data feasibility. �ճ󲹳�’s where executives see you translate intent into implementable plans—exactly the work that leads to bigger scope. Something to consider as you evaluate roles and how an org perceives compensation overall.

And if you can’t change the org chart tomorrow...

Change your operating position.

Focus on establishing a cross-functional RACI that guarantees comp a seat in coverage, quota, and product-priority discussions. Apply a simple measure-feasibility rubric during design, not after launch. Set up a monthly triad with Sales, Finance, and Systems to review dispute root causes and agree on data fixes and definition changes.

These moves pull you upstream even if your box on the chart doesn’t move—so the next time it does, there’s a clear case for placing Sales Comp where it can lead, not just react.

Breaking the ceiling: Two real paths to VP-level work

This came up as the conversation shifted from “how do I operate well today?” to “how do I get into rooms where scope gets set?”

And the panel was candid: there’s a ceiling if your portfolio never extends beyond calculating pay. But there are two proven routes past it—each with its own language, stakeholders, and artifacts—and you can start building evidence for either path from where you sit now.

Before we get into the nuances, watch this clip from the session—Kristina, Justin, and Shawn lay out the two trajectories and the experiences that make you competitive for each:

Overall here's what we took away:��

If you’re energized by GTM architecture, the Sales/RevOps track is the most direct way to VP scope.

• You’ll extend beyond compensation into quotas, territories, capacity, and coverage, and eventually run a planning COE that ties pay mechanics to how revenue is built.
• This means you need to focus on speaking pipeline and product mix as fluently as attainment.
• In this trajectory, you need to be able to model P&L trade-offs, explain how a cleaner proxy measure changes behavior, and show Finance where the dollars land. The signal executives look for isn’t that you’ve “owned comp”; it’s that you’ve translated strategy into implementable designs that Sales adopted and Finance trusted.

If you’re drawn to enterprise governance and people systems, the Total Rewards path moves you from variable comp into broad-based compensation and benefits.

• The progression here is less about a single quarter’s attainment and more about durable frameworks: market positioning, cost and fairness at scale, and board-ready storytelling.
• Here, the currency is judgment. You’ll demonstrate that you can balance competitiveness and cost, navigate policy and risk, and communicate trade-offs in language a CHRO and CFO both endorse.

Whichever route you choose, the portfolio that breaks the ceiling looks the same in a few important ways. First, it shows that you simplified a design without blunt-forcing behavior; that when the data got noisy, you chose a cleaner proxy and proved the outcome; that you led fixes to the data contracts between CRM, Finance, and Comp so latency and definitions stopped destroying trust. Moreover, it shows you can speak the company’s 10-K language—connecting plan mechanics to margin narratives and product priorities leadership is already on the hook for. When you do that, you stop arguing style and start discussing strategy.

If the org chart won’t hand you these opportunities tomorrow, it's up to you to manufacture them.

• Pick one measure to clean up and prove the lift
• Broker a three-way agreement on definitions that eliminates a recurring dispute category
• Present a quarterly readout that ties plan changes to product mix and gross margin trends executives already care about

These types of wins, for a few cycles in a row and your work stops looking like administration; it reads like leadership—on either path.

🎥 For more of Kristina and Justin's takeaways, catch the full replay on demand and explore all five sessions from the series.