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The Carrot Is The Stick
Paperback
Publisher: Braided Line Advisory, LLC
Published: Aug 5 2026
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.96
Height: 0.65 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Your sales team did exactly what you paid them to do.
That's not a criticism. It's a diagnostic. If your reps are discounting to close, sandbagging at quarter end, or ignoring the deals you need them to win, the answer is in the comp plan. Not the team. The plan.
The Carrot IS the Stick is a field guide for the people who actually design, defend, and live with sales compensation. Drawing on three decades of consulting and the most rigorous academic research on sales pay, Erik Charles walks through every major plan type, every common mistake, and the small adjustments that change rep behavior overnight.
Inside, you will learn how to:
- Set a quota your team will actually believe
- Design Hunter, Farmer, CSM, and Prospector plans that match what the role really does
- Use accelerators, clawbacks, gates, and SPIFs without breaking the plan
- Spot the silent damage caused by commission caps and quota ratcheting
- Apply what the research has shown to work, not what every other comp consultant says works
If you have ever sat in a QBR and wondered why your reps are doing exactly the wrong thing for completely understandable reasons, this book is for you.
Erik W. Charles has spent thirty years designing sales compensation for Fortune 500 companies, venture-backed startups, and most of the messy categories in between. He is Head of Revenue at Variabl, founder of Braided Line Advisory, and a frequent keynote and plenary speaker in industry, academic, and guest-lecture settings.
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