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The Carrot Is The Stick
Hardcover
Publisher Price: $29.99
Publisher: Braided Line Advisory, LLC
Published: Aug 5 2026
Pages: 240
Weight: 1.08
Height: 0.56 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.
What you will learn:
- How to set a quota your team will actually believe. The research on attainment rates, ramp curves, and the math behind why most quotas fail before they go live.
- How to design plans for the role someone actually does. Different mechanics for Hunters, Farmers, CSMs, Prospectors, sales managers, and the rest of the sales organization.
- How to use accelerators, clawbacks, gates, SPIFs, and pay mix without breaking the plan. The components most teams get wrong and the small adjustments that fix them.
- How to spot the silent damage caused by commission caps and quota ratcheting. The findings from the Misra-Nair structural model that revealed a 9% revenue lift just from removing a cap.
- What the research actually says about contests, leaderboards, transparency, and the Peter Principle in sales. Office Hours sections after each chapter put the academic evidence next to the practitioner recommendation.
Who this book is for:
VPs of Sales, CROs, RevOps leaders, compensation analysts, founders building their first sales team, CFOs modeling commission expense, and HR leaders sitting in the middle of all of the above.
If you have ever sat in a QBR and wondered why your reps were 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 and venture-backed startups. He is Head of Revenue at Variabl, founder of Braided Line Advisory, and a regular speaker at Dreamforce, Sales 3.0, and the Sales Management Association.
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