Finance Manager, Sales Compensation (Strategic Center of Excellence)

About the Role: Grade Level (for internal use): 11 The Role: The Finance Manager, Sales Compensation (Strategic Center of Excellence) will serve as a strategic and governance advisor, bringing executive presence, strong policy expertise, and a deep understanding of sales compensation strategy. This role will guide the organization through complex business changes while designing legally sound, scalable sales compensation policies. In addition to core compensation governance, the Finance Manager will oversee all SPIFF and supplemental incentive programs, including KPI collection, validation, and calculation processes to ensure accuracy, consistency, and alignment with business objectives. By applying expertise in sales behavior, incentive design, and SFDC infrastructure, this role will develop effective dispute resolution processes, create engaging training resources, and translate complex compensation methodologies into clear, actionable, and commercially relevant guidance for sales leaders. Responsibilities and Impact: This role is the cornerstone of governance, audit compliance, and strategic enablement for our sales compensation operations. By serving as the authoritative voice on policy architecture, managing complex integrations, and ensuring exactness in KPI and SPIFF calculations, the Finance Manager ensures our incentive strategies are seamlessly translated into operational reality, driving both compliance and highly motivated sales behaviors across the organization. • Establish clear, legally robust, and unambiguous global sales compensation policies. Define global approval matrices and uphold governance standards in partnership with senior Sales, People Partner, and Finance stakeholders. • Lead the assessment, mapping, and integration of incentive plans and personnel structures during corporate transactions and restructurings. Ensure compensation continuity, policy alignment, and operational readiness during periods of organizational change. • Manage the end-to-end collection, validation, and calculation of all sales compensation KPIs, ensuring accuracy, completeness, and alignment with plan requirements. • Oversee and execute calculations for all SPIFFs and custom supplemental incentives, ensuring accuracy, data integrity, and alignment with commercial milestones. • Analyze and present performance trends, risks, exceptions, and opportunities for process or incentive optimization to senior leadership. • Manage escalated compensation disputes and define comprehensive dispute-resolution SLAs and policies. Ensure issues are resolved accurately, consistently, and with a customer-centric approach to supporting sales representatives and leaders. • Evaluate custom supplemental incentives and provide advisory support to commercial and finance stakeholders. Ensure incentive structures are clear, measurable, operationally executable, and aligned with intended sales behaviors. • Draft step-by-step Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and governance workflows. Project manage multi-phased initiatives, including the integration of custom incentives, to ensure deliverables remain on track, well-documented, and operationally sustainable. • Build interactive training libraries for sales representatives and ensure seamless rollout, adoption, and tracking of required compliance and compensation training. What We're Looking For: Basic Required Qualifications: • 7+ years of relevant experience in sales compensation, finance governance, audit, sales operations, or corporate incentive strategy. • Governance & Audit Expertise: Strong background in governance, policy design, internal controls, audit trails, and risk mitigation across complex corporate compensation structures. • Policy Architecture & Structural Design: Expert-level capability in writing clear, legally robust, and unambiguous sales compensation policies and terms and conditions. • KPI, SPIFF & Incentive Calculations: Hands-on proficiency in collecting, validating, and calculating sales compensation KPIs, SPIFFs, and complex supplemental incentives with high precision. • Organizational Integration: Proven track record evaluating, mapping, and integrating incentive plans and personnel structures during corporate transactions, spinoffs, and restructurings. • Executive Presence & Negotiation: Ability to uphold governance standards, defend approval matrices, and negotiate policy changes with senior Sales, People Partners, and Finance executives. • Translational Communication: Strong ability to translate complex mathematical compensation rules into simple, commercial, and motivating terms for sales representatives and leaders. • Salesforce/SFDC Proficiency: Strategic and operational understanding of Salesforce workflows, case queues, routing rules, and dashboard reporting. • Technical Writing & Digital Enablement: Expert skill in drafting detailed SOPs, governance workflows, and training materials, and build interactive training libraries and support scalable rollout. • Customer-Centric Problem Solving & Precision: Detail-oriented approach to audit compliance, matrix tracking, dispute resolution, and query management, with a supportive and customer-centric mindset. What’s In It For You? Our Mission: Advancing Essential Intelligence. Our People: We're more than 35,000 strong worldwide—so we're able to understand nuances while having a broad perspective. Our team is driven by curiosity and a shared belief that Essential Intelligence can help build a more prosperous future for us all.From finding new ways to measure sustainability to analyzing energy transition across the supply chain to building workflow solutions that make it easy to tap into insight and apply it. We are changing the way people see things and empowering them to make an impact on the world we live in. We’re committed to a more equitable future and to helping our customers find new, sustainable ways of doing business. Join us and help create the critica…