Designing Sales Incentives That Drive Results In Transportation And Logistics with Beth Carroll

Want sellers to chase profit instead of empty volume? We sat down with Beth Carroll, CEO of Prosperio Group, to unpack how compensation design can sharpen focus, strengthen culture, and keep teams motivated through freight cycles. We walk through the foundations - target total compensation, target incentive, and the mechanics that fit each role -then dig into the real differentiator: role-based pay mix. Hunters who ask for the signature thrive on higher risk and upside; account managers who protect and expand existing business need stability to think long term. Get the mixes right and behavior follows.

From there, we talk strategy. Flat commissions on linehaul or margin are simple, but they often pay for the wrong wins. If profitability matters, tie pay to the customers, lanes, and deals that actually create value. If goals matter (and when don’t they?)make them matter in the paycheck with quota kickers, accelerators, or tiered rates above target. Beth shares practical fixes you can deploy fast, plus a reminder that incentives act like a megaphone for priorities. Choose a small set of metrics that align with your vision and culture, then make the math crystal clear.

Transparency and compliance carry the plan across the finish line. Standardize documents by role, respect state-by-state rules on commission timing, and give sellers calculators with source data from your TMS and CRM. That clarity turns every pay cycle into a coaching moment: here’s what you earned, why, and how to earn more next time. We also explore how marketing incentives can support sales through team-based goals and modest at-risk pay, and why shared targets across pods can dissolve friction between functions.

If you’re ready to stop rewarding the wrong behavior and start paying for the outcomes that matter, this conversation is your playbook. Subscribe, share with a sales leader who needs it, and leave a review to tell us the one change you’ll make to your comp plan this quarter.

Check out the Transportation Sales and Marketing Association (TMSA) website or engage with us on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Meet Beth Carroll And Prosperio

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 0:23

Hello, everyone, and welcome to On the Move, a show where we share transportation sales and marketing success stories. I am Jennifer Harpers Romaine, Executive Director of TMSA, a trade nonprofit educating and connecting marketing and sales professionals in transportation and logistics. And today I'm really excited to have Beth Carroll, CEO of Prosperio Group, on the show today. How are you doing? I'm doing great. How are you doing, Jennifer? Good. I'm so excited to have you on the show back into TMSA. You were a previous supporter and partner member of the organization coming back into the fold. Super exciting. For those of you who may not know you yet, though, tell us a little bit about yourself and your company and all the work that you're doing around sales strategy and compensation.

SPEAKER_03 1:12

Yep. So I've been around the industry for 18 years now. We are an incentive design compensation firm. So we help companies. We've been focusing on transportation and logistics for the last 18 years. I personally have 28 years of experience doing incentive comp design. Traditionally trained in sales compensation through like World at Work and Sherm and all the, you know, Mercer and Towers Perrin and Hewitt and all of those guys, the strategy that they use to do this, that that's where I came from. And I've just spent the last 18 years figuring out how to apply all of those principles to sales roles and other roles within the transportation and logistics industry. So that's what we do.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 1:59

Awesome. And I love that you touched on like when you say compensation, most people just think about sales, but there are other roles that can be utilized to have those compensation packages. I do think it's important to find the way to motivate our employees. And some of those compensation packages can really help with that inside and outside of sales. So I think that's really great. Um, I do think, of course, when we talk about compensation, mostly sales, and it's one of those topics that everybody cares about, of course. Everybody everywhere cares about how they get paid and how much they get paid. It's just a fact, it's how we survive. But we don't always talk about the compensation piece openly. Right. I'm curious what you're seeing right now when it comes to how sales teams are being compensation, compensated in this industry.

SPEAKER_03 2:52

So let's let's break the word compensation down a little bit

Defining Compensation And Pay Mix

SPEAKER_03 2:55

first, just so that we can make sure we're clear what we're talking about. Because when you get into like the discipline of designing compensation plans, there's terminology that goes along with that. And that's part of what we teach our clients when they engage us to help them redesign anything. So you start with like target total comp or software companies might call it OTE on target earnings, but that's the amount somebody makes combination of salary plus their incentive at 100% performance. Then you've got what is their target incentive amount, okay, which is that portion that's not salary, it's not fixed, that is tied to performance. So some places call it a sales incentive plan, a SIP, a variable compensation plan, short-term incentive plan. It can have lots of different meat, lots of different titles or labels. But basically what it is, is it's tying pay to performance. And that's really the world we live in, although we also help companies make sure they've got the right pay mix. So when you're asking a question about like what are what are the hot topics or what are people talking about in terms of compensation these days, salary is typically the piece that's like more secretive. Like you don't, you're not really supposed to talk about salary, although there's been a lot of there's been a lot of legislation recently about what can and can't be shared, and it's not, it's much more employee friendly now than it used to be to make sure that people aren't having like real big differences in terms of salary that aren't appropriate. From the incentive design perspective, there's less secretiveness about it because it's all tied to performance, right? If you're on the commission plan and you're paid 1% of line haul, then everybody's gonna know well, the sales reps for this asset company are paid 1% of line haul, and that's how it works. And if somebody sold a million, I know what they made, and if somebody told sold two million, I know what they made. So that piece of it tends to be a lot more transparent. What I'm seeing companies grapple with a lot more these days is how to get that pay mix right. So, how much should be in salary, and then how much should be in an incentive, even before we start talking about how do you design the incentive? Like, is it a commission? Is it a goal-based um percentage of target incentive approach? There's a lot of different ways to do it. Do they get bounties for new customer acquisition? But really, figuring out because we've had such a big swing lately in this industry, 22 was a great year, right? So everybody's making a lot of money in 22, and then it went down, right? And now we're at the hopefully the end of one of the longest freight recessions ever, I hope. Um, but it's been it's made it really hard to get that mixed right because people, human beings, need more money to live off of, right? So they're asking for more from a salary perspective, but companies are fading facing increased pressures on their profitability. They want to have it be more variable, but the more variable the pay is, the less money somebody's making in a down market, the less they're able to sustain themselves. And so it creates this pressure. So I think that's what a lot of companies are working with. And it really, that decision, pay mix, shouldn't be driven by market economics. It should be driven by the nature of the role and a concept that we call prominence, which is basically the more influence a seller has over actually getting the paper signed, you know, going back to like Glenn Gary Glen Glenn Ross movie, you know, always be closing. Are you the one that's asking for the signature? Um, that is a highly prominent role, and those people should have more pay at risk. People that are more like account managers that are managing an existing book, maybe trying to upsell within the book, retain the book, are less prominent. It's not a bad thing. It's just descriptive, right? They're just they're less prominent, and so they should have less pay at risk more in their salary. So for those roles, we're looking at more like 70-30, 75, 25 pay mix, more heavily salaried. Whereas new

Market Swings Vs Role-Based Design

SPEAKER_03 6:40

logo hunters are more likely going to be 50-50. So I uh I'm seeing a lot of um more sophisticated conversations coming out in the transportation industry than I had seen in the first 10 years or so working with this industry to really that they start to understand how pay mix works now and then it's more appropriately aligned by role rather than a reaction to economic conditions.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 7:04

I'm really happy that you said that because I do think that people will jump the gun and change things too quickly with what's going on right now, and it should be role-based. Like they like we said, it's not a bad thing. This is just what it is, it's just a definition. This is okay, this person is more in charge of getting that signature. This person's more in charge of upselling, so they should still get some type of commission because they are moving the needle, but that's not the bulk of their role.

SPEAKER_03 7:34

So that's not the bulk of it. And and it's gonna be need, it's going to need to be defined so that it's really targeting that upsell or that increased business, not just a payment on sitting on an entire book, which is a classic problem that we have. I'm actually seeing a lot more transportation and logistics companies, and I work across all. I work with a lot of brokers, I work with warehousing companies, I work with um asset-based trucking companies, I'm working with some of the big um software suppliers right now into the industry, which is a whole different animal when you're talking about software. Um, but I work pretty much any anybody in supply chain, even some of the vendors to supply chain. I did a big project last year um with one of the companies that sells like forklifts to, you know, to the warehouses and stuff. So um I'm seeing the use of an account management role a lot more commonly now than I did 10 years ago, right? So just the understanding before it was always just, you know, you've got hunters and then you've got your operations people, but now there's an inner an intermediate in there that is becoming more sophisticated. It used to just be, they'd even call it customer service. And that's not what it should be, right? Like this account management role should be much more sophisticated. Somebody who can sit down and have a conversation with somebody in the C-suite and get them, you know, to renegotiate a deal or to add more lanes or locations or whatever it is. So that's been an interesting development for me.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 9:06

Have you found then that companies are getting that mix around compensation wrong? Like especially as these markets are fluctuating, customer expectations are changing, they're continuing to evolve, are they adapting too quickly to what's going on instead of building kind of the foundation of what it should be?

SPEAKER_03 9:26

Yeah, they are. And it it's it's human nature, right? You think, well, if a little bit of incentive is a good thing, then a lot of incentive must be must be even better. But there's a point where you actually tip it over and it becomes negative, right? So you want to make sure that you're not inappropriately motivating a role. For example, you wouldn't put somebody in accounting on a 50-50 pay mix, right? I mean, that just doesn't make any sense. It doesn't align with the nature of the role. So you want to make sure you're not doing something that creates um income anxiety or inappropriate behaviors or things like that from roles that are critical to the success of your organization. So I do see there are a lot that I mean, this industry is largely grown up around entrepreneurs who started doing this stuff themselves. They either they bought a truck and were running a truck themselves, they started a brokerage, you know, they've got some VC money and maybe started some warehouses, whole variety of things that could have happened that these now big companies got started. And the leaders think, well, I want everybody to think like I do. I want everybody to think like an owner and to have skin in the game. They always say that, right? We want to have some skin in the game, we want a sense of urgency, we want them to be hungry. For some of the roles, that's appropriate. For other roles, it's the complete wrong thing to do, right? That you're not hunger is a good motivation for new logo sellers. It's a really bad motivation

Rise Of Account Management Roles

SPEAKER_03 10:55

for account managers. You want them to be able to think strategically, long term, you know, making decisions that are going to be good for their customer and good for your company over a much longer period of time than just sign on the line that is dotted, right? New sellers are very like right now focused, and that's where you want them to be. So hunger is appropriate there, but it's not appropriate in many of the other roles.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 11:22

And so when sales leaders are then thinking about how to compensate their teams, motivating performance, retaining talent right now, aligning then with the broader business goals, how should they be thinking about compensation for those teams?

SPEAKER_03 11:38

First off, you want to make sure that you're looking at the market. So there are surveys out there, um, a little bit of a shameful promotion here, but Prosperito runs the only freight broker compensation survey that exists in the world. So if anybody listening is running a freight brokerage or has freight broker roles in their organization, we can help you with that data. Um, there are other surveys. ATA runs a survey for trucking companies, ERI runs some surveys as well. There's some other commercially available things. So you want to make sure that you're matching to the market, that you're not over or underpaying for the relevant labor market for the job that you're looking for. And then you want to make sure that you're designing your incentive plan once you've decided how much money should be spent and what goes in each bucket. You want to make sure you're designing your incentive plan to truly drive the performance that you need. And too many times I see plans in this industry that are just 1% of line haul, 10% of gross margin, right? Well, not all line haul is equal, not all customers are equal. In the brokerage world, certainly not all margin is equal. When you start talking about warehousing customers, you get really different returns from different customers that you have depending on how they're managing their inventory and what it is that they're expecting you to do with it. So you need to be very directive with your sellers about what types of customers you want them going after. It's good to have simple compensation plans, yes, but it is not good to have them be so simple that somebody can win doing the exact opposite of what you actually need them to do. So you do need to put some thought into having them be directive enough and aligned with your business strategy that you're sure that you are truly rewarding the top performers across all aspects, not just the one who sold the most.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 13:28

I think that's really good advice. Like, I even on prior to taking this role is more on the marketing side of things, and I'm always like, I would have bosses that be like, I want to do all this crazy stuff, but be like, but why? Like, how does it align to the business goals? I feel like sometimes we get in our own way,

Common Pay Mix Mistakes And “Hunger”

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 13:45

thinking things have to be a certain way, but sometimes you just need to take a breath, take a step back, think about how this is aligning to our business goals and how can we move the needle forward. And that's a really important step. I think that's really important to, you know, take that step back, make sure that we're aligning everything down to our core business goals and moving forward. Yep. Um, we talked a little bit at the beginning about transparency and how salary transparency is getting better, making sure that there's not such um misalignment on people's base pay and things like that. But how much do you think transparency is playing in compensation conversations right now, both at like a full leadership level, but with sales teams themselves?

SPEAKER_03 14:29

I think it's always been there among sales teams, right? They've always talked about their commission plans because they're not, those aren't hidden, right? Like everybody signs the same, or they shouldn't be. Like it should be the same compensation plan for everybody. If you have a sales incentive plan for a role, everybody in that role should have the same sales incentive plan. Um, if you have different plans, then you are running real risk of having some legal challenges made. And another thing I want to point out is that some people who haven't been around this, the world of compensation design don't realize that there are legal rules about compensation, right? So beyond FLSA and who gets paid overtime and who doesn't, there's actually rules that apply to um sales commission plans in particular that vary can vary state by state. And they deal with things like can you hold back any money? Can you say that you've calculated their incentive pay, but you're holding it back to a future date? Normally that's not an okay thing to do. There are states that say if you are paying them on a commission, you must pay them at least monthly. That you can't pay commissions on a quarterly basis. It's if it's a literal commission, which means it's a percentage of revenue or a percentage of margin. Goal-based incentives are different, although I can't I couldn't guarantee that a court wouldn't interpret a goal-based incentive as a commission. So you still have to be careful about that. Um, but just be aware that there are rules down to things like how frequently you have to pay these things. So you need to be aware of that. And that's that leads me back to my point about you really should have very standardized planned documents, all of the rules written out so that everybody knows exactly how it works. Give them calculators, give them examples, remove as much ambiguity as possible. There's always going to be some oddball situation. Well, what happens now? Right? And so then you have to figure out how you deal with that thing that nobody ever thought was going to happen, but it happened. Um, and get that documented and written down into your plan documents as well. So you should be on the incentive side of things, it should be 100% transparent. There should be nothing that is left to guess on that in that side.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 16:43

Absolutely. Um I like that you brought that up too, that like just legally make sure that you're in check and that there are different um different states have different rules and creating a standard document that or plan that's applicable to all those things. And then that is what you're presenting, makes things really fair. I also feel like then if people are starting to question, like, why are why are we compensated this way or why are we paid out this way to this um cadence, you have a legality reason to do that.

SPEAKER_03 17:18

So sales compensation is one of the most litigious areas, right? You are more likely to get sued over something to do with your sales incentive plan than you are probably with anything else, other than the whole FLSA, who gets overtime, who doesn't.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 17:34

So I think that's a really great aspect that maybe not everyone's thinking through as they're building, especially. I feel like, um, like you said, this industry is built on entrepreneurial ship. And so I've seen a lot of company go from like one person to multiple people in that growth plan. And so as you're building and building rapidly, you might not be thinking about it.

SPEAKER_03 17:53

Right. No, and they don't typically have a lot of now now, the bigger ones for sure do, but HR is typically thought of more as a clerical function than a strategic advisory function. And so as you get more sophisticated, you need to make sure that you've got HR people

Market Data And Directive Incentives

SPEAKER_03 18:10

surrounding you, whether they're in-house or out, out of house or whatever, that are aware of all of these things and can give you more high-level sophisticated advice than somebody who's just processing your payroll, right? Or, you know, just doing all the paperwork for a new hire and making sure you've got all your I9s and stuff like that. That's an important function, but really the HR function should be at a much, much higher level in the organization.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 18:37

I think that really makes sense, especially because there's going to be questions. Like I like we said before, people care about how they're getting paid, how much they're getting paid. These are going to be questions that employees have. And if you don't have concrete answers, then that's where a lot of questions come in, or people don't feel valued, or um, like I always say, everything's like a puzzle, and everyone wants to know how their piece of the puzzle fits in and with everybody else. And I never really thought about this as being a piece of that, but it really is like why am I getting paid how I'm getting paid? And is it fair? Because if they don't feel like it's fair and you can't answer the questions behind why it is, then you're really putting yourself in a tough spot.

SPEAKER_03 19:17

And that's the transparency point. So I tell my clients all the time, because we we've gotten so we deliver calculators now. It used to be that it was more just the design, and then you know, here you've got a PowerPoint, have at it. Now we actually give them Excel-based calculators that are as close to software as you could possibly get. Um, and that lets them actually run the calculations to give something to payroll, to give the employees what if tools that they can do their own little calculations in and say, hey, if I want to make a million dollars this year, what do I have to do to do it? Right. So punch in the numbers and then create a plan for themselves. But I tell them if they're not sitting down with the employees after every pay cycle and going through their calculations. And showing them here's what you did, here's why you got paid what you got paid, and here's what you can do next time to make more money, then they're really missing out on a fantastic coaching opportunity. And I recommend I actually have a trucking company that I talked with this week that said, Well, we don't typically show all of the load data for how they got paid. They just run the reports themselves, they check it out, and they come back and tell us whether they agree with our math or not. And I'm like, that seems a little problematic. Like, why wouldn't you give them the load data? So in our calculators, because they're pulled out of the TMS data, we actually show on everybody's tab exactly what made up their number for that month. So they can see exactly whether it was line haul by customer, gross margin dollars by load, sales, if it's in a warehouse world, what actual contracts were signed coming out of the CRM system. Whatever the data can give us, we actually put that in so they know, oh, my number is this. I got paid based on this formula against this number, and here's what made up that number. So there's no question whatsoever.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 21:07

I love that. I think that that transparency piece is really, really important. I'm curious of all the things that we talked about, like I don't want our listeners to be like, I feel overwhelmed. There is so much information to take on. So if a sales leader is listening right now, what is one meaningful improvement that they could make to their compensation strategy this year? Like, where should they begin if they're not really hitting the market all the time?

SPEAKER_03 21:33

They don't know. The the biggest miss that I see, single biggest thing, is they will define, they will have goals. Like they would tell their salespeople, here's what we need you to sell for the year. But there is nothing in their incentive plan that is connected to that goal. So they'll say, We need you to sell a million dollars in revenue and you get paid 1% of line haul or whatever the numbers are, right? And nothing happens when they hit a million dollars. Before a million dollars, they get 1% of line haul. After a million dollars, they get 1% of line haul. There's no acceleration, there's no, there's nothing. You could even you could do a simple quota bonus that sits beside your 1% of line haul if you want to, and just say, at the end of the year, we've got a scale that says where were you relative to your goal? And if you're above goal, you get proportionately like two to one extra for being above goal. For every 1% of goal extra, you get two percent of your incentive target extra. It could be done as a kicker. There's lots of different ways you could go about it, but people are always mystified. Like, well, why does nobody care about their goals? Why, why are we not able to hit our goals? Well, because you've not connected it to anything. Well, all they the goal to them is just will my manager yell at me or not.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 22:50

Sure.

SPEAKER_03 22:51

That's it. And some managers don't really enforce it all that much either. And they, you know, or they're not they're not the yelling kind, or whatever it

Transparency, Legal Risks, And Plan Docs

SPEAKER_03 23:00

is. But you have to create if hitting goal is important, and I have not known any, I've worked with over 500 companies, and I have not known one yet that says, no, we don't care if anybody hits their goals. Hitting goals matters, and so you need to make it matter in their incentive compensation plan.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 23:19

Absolutely. That's a really good place to start. Like I said, I think everyone cares about how their piece of the puzzle fits in. If I have a goal, why? Why? Those are I I'm probably one of those employees that are always like, but why? Like, where how does that matter? How does that affect the overall business growth, the goals? And because then you can really understand why you're doing what you're doing, which then helps motivate you to get to goal. And yeah, there should be a difference between under goal, goal, and far achieving goal, more than just a straight line, right?

SPEAKER_03 23:50

I always say that in those straight line commission plans, when you get to goal and you win, it's like winning a pie eating contest and the prize is a pie. You kind of want something different, right? Like more of the same is not all that attractive. You need to have something material change when you get to that point, whether it's an increased commission rate, that's an easy way to do it. You get above goal from that point forward, you get one and a half percent of line hall. There you go. Very easy fix to a basic asset compensation plan, right? 1% of line haul. When you hit your annual goal for the year, everything you sell thereafter, pay them one and a half percent. You've now tied something to goal.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 24:33

I think that's really smart. Great place to start. And like you said, it doesn't have to be crazy complicated, it can be simple, but it needs to be something, it needs to be meaningful, right?

SPEAKER_03 24:43

It needs to get their attention. What I always say, and I'm sure I didn't come up with this, I'm sure this is from my mentor at Towers, but um, when you put something in the incentive plan for your for salespeople in particular, but for anybody in the organization, it's like putting a megaphone on it, right? So you can talk about culture, values, all of this other stuff. But what you have put as their, you know, two or three or maybe four things that they're being paid on in their incentive plan, that creates such incredible focus because it's now something that they can affect. They can change their financial results by doing the things that you have told them to do. So you have to be really, really careful that those things are aligned with your culture, vision, values. I've also had companies sometimes that have really got that alignment wrong. So they like they want profitability, but they pay on revenue. You're not gonna get profitability if you're paying them only on revenue without regard to margin impact. So you just you want to make sure that you are thinking through all of what your business needs and wants and how it affects your culture, right? Do you want a bunch of hard-charging cutthroats out there? Do you want people working collaboratively? Your incentive plan is going to affect your culture way more than what any management person is going to say.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 26:07

True. And I think when you do that too, you're also guiding them on what you're saying their most important avenue of work is. Absolutely. And so you're saying, hey, you have goals that we want you to meet, you have metrics here. It's tied to what you're compensated for. So they understand what's most important for them to execute on it work. So absolutely. So shifting gears a little bit, you were a part of TMSA before, you've stepped away from for a few years, you're now coming back into the fold. And so I was really excited. I know we met back in the day when I was a member and you were a member. Now I'm I was actually on board. I was for a while. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm curious what brought you back in and why are you coming back now?

SPEAKER_03 26:53

Um, well, we run a small company, right? And so I have three employees, and it is um, I do I still do a lot of the work, most of the design work. And so there was a time where it was just I had to be really careful about where how thin I was spreading myself out. And so TMSA, I also had, you know, children that were heading into college and all of that kind of stuff I had to manage. So TMSA unfortunately just did not, you know, make the cut at that point in terms of my priorities. I have my last one is finishing up college right now, will graduate in May, and so I have a lot more time where I can think about you know things that I want to do from a professional standpoint. And TM TMSA has evolved over the years and it's become there's new leadership involved. And so I felt like it was a time it had changed, I had changed. It was time to come back to this because I did really value it when I was with it before, and I got some great, great clients and connections from my work with TMSA. Um, so I'm really excited that my life has opened up now to the point that I can come

Calculators, Coaching, And Data Visibility

SPEAKER_03 28:05

back and be more involved in it.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 28:07

Well, congratulations on the last one getting ready to graduate college, and we're excited to have you back. And one of the things when we talked about you coming back in was we just are now launching track-based, a track-based model for TMSA. And we'll have five different tracks that our members or conference attendees can pick from company leader, sales leader, marketing leader, sales practitioner, or marketing practitioner to help better engage and create more role-based content for people in our organization. One of the reasons why we really wanted to do this was because we found that like at elevate, we would have a marketing track, a sales track, but then people would be like, no, I need higher level content. And then other people were like, No, I'm in the trenches. I need you to give me the tools right now to make my life easier, to execute more. And so we're shifting this, but also so that our partner members, such as yourself, could better target and better engage with the people that they want to work with or that they could offer value to. So we're really excited that as you are coming back, you are one of those track sponsors for the sales leader track. And like I said, new programming initiative. It's one of the things that kind of drew you back in. What with this new change, this new setup, what made you excited to then you know take on that leadership role in that track?

SPEAKER_03 29:30

Well, I think it's the focus that you talked about, right? And that was, I think that was a little bit of what was TMSA was struggling with before, was it was just a little bit too blended. And I wasn't sure that I had the right. I mean, sales reps are interested in my content, but it's not really appropriate for sales reps, right? It really is more directed to sales managers or to sales leaders. Um, sales reps, if they are thinking that they're going to be a manager, could certainly learn from it, but it's not typically relevant to them. And so being now clear that you've got a track, that it's like this is clearly targeting sales leaders. Hopefully, there will be a lot of sales leaders that come to Elevate and can get the content that is directly relevant for them, like this conversation today. Um, you know, they could have more information that comes to them that's based on where they are and what they need. So it's about coaching, you know, how do they get the most out of their team? Um, all of those different things. Compensation is a piece of that, but there's other things that sales leaders need to make sure that they're doing the best job that they can to help their reps be successful.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 30:41

Absolutely. And that's part of what you said to you like there might be sales reps that could be interested in the content, but it's not for them per se. But if they're growing, it could be. So that's part of why we've established a primary and a parallel track. So the primary track is going to be like, this is what I'm doing right now, this is what's most pertinent to me right now. But if they select a parallel track that could be for the sales rep that wants to grow into the sales leader so they can still have access to that content, they can still learn. Um, and then also I found that a lot of our member companies, there's like a VP of sales and marketing, and we want to make sure that we're allowing those people to gain access to both sides of their role so we're not just pigeonholing them into one spot. So um, we're really excited about it. Of course, it's now all in execution. I've been sitting all changing the website, changing the infrastructure, reaching out to members, getting them to select track, um, building the elevate agenda to make sure that we're, you know, um having networking for each track, having education for each track. And then,

The Biggest Miss: Goals Not Tied To Pay

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 31:45

of course, there's going to be things like our shippers panel and our economy panel that's applicable to everyone and just building all that stuff. But it is really exciting. And for me, um, being a member of TMSA for years and then taking on the leadership role, I as we went in towards the end of last year, I really was like, I feel like we could be doing this better and let's, you know, modernize and move move the needle forward.

SPEAKER_03 32:08

So I think it's a great innovation. I think it's gonna make the organization much more valuable to everybody who's in uh involved with it.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 32:16

Well, I appreciate that. It's always good to hear because it is a lot of work to um, you know, upgrade and change everything, but we're really pumped about it and excited to move forward. Um, we do talk a lot at TMSA about the alignment between sales and marketing because these are our people involved. But do you think that compensation can either support that alignment or can it unintentionally break it as people talk about it more, have structured more? We talked about sometimes there are other departments that could have these compensation pieces. Marketing is now more engaged in that lead generation conversation. Does it help hinder or it's not affecting anything right now?

SPEAKER_03 32:58

I think it could be a problem if people don't understand the basics that we talked about before in terms of the nature of the role, right? Like marketing can have incentive compensation. And depending on how much are they doing, are they doing quantifiable lead gen? Is it or is it a role that's like actually a business development rep that is going and setting up appointments that happens to live in the marketing department? Um, there are things that can be tied to company success in marketing where you could do an incentive plan, but it's typically really hard to get at individual influence on that because a lot of marketing is a team effort. People have to work together on a website. It's rarely one person. Maybe in the smaller companies it is. But it's rarely one person that is just focusing on the website. And so you end up with more team-based incentives. And then going back to my whole notion of pay mix, marketing people should not have 50% of their pay in an incentive, right? They should be like 80, 20, 90, 10 type of pay mix tied to team performance. But to your point, you want to make sure that whatever you're incentivizing on the marketing side supports how you're incentivizing the salespeople and vice versa. And there's always conflict there, just like there's conflict between sales and operations. So you want to make sure that you're looking at those conflicts and those points of tension, and you're certainly not making it worse through your incentive plan. And if you can do something to bring everybody onto a team, that's an even better thing to do. So if you have groups that focus on like one type of customer or one territory or one business segment, you know, however your organization is broken down, you could cross-functionally say if we achieve a specific goal for that group, the marketing team that supports that and the sales team that supports that has a shared incentive that encourages them to work together.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 35:01

Great. I think that's great advice. Um, good things to think about, and that breakdown between in the two and like what their their own pocket should be. So, well, I'm excited to have you back in TMSA and to continue all these different kinds of conversations. It's very fascinating to me. Um, so I I the human elements of everything is what fascinates me. So just how people are motivated, how we can help them um understand their roles and feel more fulfilled at work and get paid the way that makes the most sense. Seems simple, it's not, um, but having experts like you kind of guide us through is always, always great. So um, I do have one last question that I ask everybody that comes on the show. And that's if you could go back in time and advise a younger version of yourself, and this could be anything personally or professionally, when would you go back to and what would you say?

SPEAKER_03 35:51

I was thinking I've been thinking about that question because I knew it was coming. And I'm glad you gave it to me ahead of time because it would have been hard to come up with something on the spot. I don't know that there's a particular point in time that I would go back to, um, but maybe just sort of all along the way, because what I've realized, I'm 58 years old now. I'm planning on hopefully retiring within the next 10 years, hopefully having my my second layer of employees be able to take over the business and keep it going without me. I'm working hard to make that a reality because I don't want prospero to end when I decide to retire. Um, but I think that at every point along the way, what you value, like

Incentives Shape Culture And Behavior

SPEAKER_03 36:30

you're you're like Maslow's hierarchy of needs kind of thing, it's like you there's a there's there's that kind of a hierarchy professionally as well. Like, is it money? Like, what is it that you're going after? Is it recognition? Is it title? Is it, you know, increased responsibility? What are all of those things that you're trying to achieve? Looking back now over 28 years of professional life, throw five more years on that when I was working as a secretary in a law firm in the accounting department, which is about as low on the totem pole as you can be in an accounting firm. So, whatever that is, 33 years of work history now. Um, it's amazing to me how quickly that hierarchy changes, right? Like at obviously, when you're first starting out, money is what gonna be one of the primary motivational things because you don't have it, you need it. So that's what you're working towards, and that's the focus. Then you get into the family raising years, right? And time in a different way starts to become important. Like you need to have that's and I deal with this with clients all the time in terms of why aren't my sellers selling so much? It's because they've got kids that are in sports, right? What they could do before is different now, right? So they don't have the ability to work 12 hours a day. They have to, they want to go be able to see the kids' games. So your needs shift at that point. And now that I'm now getting toward the end of it, getting to the sunset time, I'm seeing needs are very different at this point for me as well. I'm now thinking about am I financially for secure for retirement? Um, we're snowbirds now. Thanks to COVID, we were able to pick up and go to Florida a lot sooner than we thought we were going to. And I live six months of the year in a 55 and up retirement RV resort. And everybody here plays all the time. And so now and I'm still working. And they're all like, Are you still working? Why do you have to keep working? You work so much. Why can't you stop? And so now I feel like you know, my value system is like, wow, it would be nice if I had more time, if I could go do some of the fun activities that they are doing instead of working all the time. I know that's coming, and I'm young for here. I mean, this is a 55 and up, and I'm 58. So I barely qualify to even. But I think I would just go back and say, don't get so focused on what's right now, because it's gonna change very quickly, right? I mean, you have to meet your needs at the time that you're trying to meet them, right? If you can't pay your bills, you've got to get more money somehow. Exactly. And then when your kids are young, they need you and you have to be focusing on that. But I think everybody's you get so absorbed in that period of your life that it's hard to see how any other period is going to be different than this, you know. But just to say it will change, it will change, and what is most important to you right now is gonna be fifth on the list in the future, right? Luckily, I've been blessed with health, so I don't have that. But I you know, I know that lots of people, especially as we start to get older, you start to realize how critical health becomes as a priority, right? So making sure that you're doing things to take care of yourself into the future, because maybe health isn't so important right now, but at some point it's going to be critical. And if you're not doing something to lay the foundation for it now, it's going to be. A big problem later. So, my advice to me would be just take

TMSA’s Track Model And Sponsorship

SPEAKER_03 40:05

each era a little bit less seriously and know that it's gonna change. It's gonna change, and something else is gonna come that's going to be more important than the thing that is most important to you right now.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 40:18

I think that's really good advice. As I sit here on record day that was supposed to not have a kid home on a snow day. Um, but he's here and uh yeah, like that flexibility of time is really important to me right now because that's life. I lived it, I lived it for years.

SPEAKER_03 40:35

Yeah, I used to do the snap thing. They'd come in when I was on a call and I'd snap.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 40:40

Yeah. So yes, yes. He um he's good about it. I now he's eight, he's almost nine, so he like he understands, but um, as as with age, he used to just come and just close the laptop and be like, mommy, done. I'm like, mommy, not done.

SPEAKER_03 40:59

So, but um, yeah, I think everybody's gotten so much better about it though, after COVID. I mean, I was a remote worker since you know early since 2000, really. I mean, even a little bit before that. Um, but my middle child was born in 2000, and I I basically told Towers, I was like, I have to be able to work from home, you know, several days a week to be able to pull this off because I had to travel for clients. I had, you know, so it's like I'm on the road. I'm not schlepping into the Chicago office just to have FaceTime with people. You know, when it's like I'm on the road three, four days a week, I need to be home. So, but I think now people are a lot more accustomed to the flexible work life and to the kids coming in when you're on the call and all that kind of stuff.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 41:46

Yes, yes. I I started um in 2017. So I predated COVID, um, but not by by far. And but even that, like it's it's way better now than when it was was prior. So I feel like everyone's just used to it. The dog, the kid, the whatever everyone has. Everyone has a life beyond work. Took us a long time to realize that, but yeah, but before we had to pretend we didn't.

SPEAKER_03 42:08

It wasn't it so weird. We had to pretend like when we walked, it was like Fred Flintstone clocking in now. It's like when you clock in, you're you are no longer a human being outside of work, you are just this robot inside work. And I'm so glad that it's not. I think women have always known that it was much more fluid than that. But I think everybody knows that now. You know, it's like you don't have to go into the bathroom to do a phone call with the babysitter, you know, to try to pretend you're not having a problem at home that you're trying to deal with.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 42:38

So yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm so excited to have you back in TMSA. So glad that you were able to find time to come on the show and talk to us about all things compensation. Definitely gives me a lot to think about. So I'm sure it um entertained the masses. So uh thank you again, and I will catch everybody next week. Thank you.