Stacey Mangold (Axway) on If a Rep Can't Explain Their Comp Plan in Two Minutes, Something's Broken

Speaker A: Welcome to Go2Masters and welcome to season four where we sit down with the Rev Ops, Sales ops and Go to market leaders from some of the most dynamic B2B companies in the world and unpack the real thinking behind the decisions that, ah, move revenue. I'm your host, Jose Leman, VP of Go to Market Excellence at Everstage. Joining me today is someone who has spent her career being handed the hardest problems in sales operations and fixing them. She has built comp plans from the ground up at five companies across healthcare, energy, data, pricing software and enterprise tech. And she has delivered those plans personally to reps and lived with the results. She currently runs Go to Market renewals and Finance ops simultaneously at Axways, a publicly listed software company with over 11,000 customers worldwide. Please welcome Stacey Mangold, VP of RevOps at Axway. Stacy, thanks for being with us today.

Speaker B: Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Yes, a pleasure. You have an impressive trajectory. We'll get into it for sure. And uh, it looks like you're quite busy with everything you're doing for Axway, so, uh, double thanks for taking the time to do this with us today.

Speaker B: Of course, of course. Very happy to be here.

Speaker A: Excellent. So we'll start a little bit with your sort of career trajectory. We know you've followed two different leaders across five companies. Ones from GHX to Health Grades and then from Vandava through Oria to Axway, if I got that right. And many ops people just job hop for titles, but you switch jobs to stay close to great operators. What does following someone like that actually teach you about how revenue gets built and works?

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, finding a wonderful leader that believes in you and wants to see you grow is the greatest thing you can do for your career.

Speaker A: And.

Speaker B: And I've had the opportunity to work for several leaders that have seen my potential and allowed me many opportunities at companies that I've never had before, which is more important to me than a title. Even at my current company, I've had many amazing leaders, especially my current one, that have believed in me enough to give me opportunities that have pushed me beyond what I thought I was capable of doing. And for that, I'm incredibly thankful. And it's because of these opportunities that I've had the chance to see all different aspects of go to market, from marketing to sales to operations to renewals. And this has afforded me the ability to look at building revenue from all aspects of the business. And it gives me a different perspective on how revenue is built and the ability to offer different, you know, inputs when we are building revenue models and revenue plans.

Speaker A: Amazing. Yeah, that resonates a lot with me. I've done a bit of the same. Not so much not five companies but yet two leaders. And I agree it's a really. It's a gift finding someone that can be, uh, a role model that you have to work with. And I find that. I'm sure it also did it for you. It helps model your own behavior as a leadership, as a leader for your team. And you're sort of trying to replicate some of those behaviors that you found special when you were working for someone.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Learning from them and growing from them. Um, and yeah, taking those skills and modeling them has definitely shaped me as a leader.

Speaker A: Was there a specific moment when something happened that you saw, okay, this is someone I want to follow into the next role? Like, I really want to stay close to this person.

Speaker B: Ultimately, it comes down to just watching how they lead in stressful situations. All of the leaders that I've followed and admired through my career have been incredible people. Leaders, they care very much about the culture they create and the legacy that they'll leave. Sure, you know, they want to hit their numbers. They. But at the end of the day, they want to leave the company they are at in a better place. And there's no better time to see what type of leader they are than when they're in a stressful situation and how they lead their team through it. And it's in those moments and, you know, how they react and how they treat all of the people underneath them that ultimately I'm like, yes, that's the person that I want to follow. That's the person that I want to be like. That's the person that I can emulate as a leader.

Speaker A: Amazing. Yeah, there's nothing like a bit of a stress test to really see where people minds actually at, uh, cct, maybe sometimes to be a good leader in the. In the good times. But times get a bit tough, then the real ingredients of what you're made of really come out. So that is amazing. Well, good for you, I think. And also, obviously, it has worked well for you, and you now have both the title and the great leader. So that's. That's a really good story. Wanted to get into sort of the meat of the discussion today, uh, around comp as you know, every stage where our bread and butter is ICM management. So talking about comp plans, you discussed that. You said that if a rep can't explain their own comp plan back to you in two minutes. Something's broken. And that sounds really cool, but it's like a super high bar. When did you first learn that? Easy or hard? And just that balance between complexity in the plan, trust and sophistication, Is it a good thing? When is it? When not. And what was your personal story to get to that point?

Speaker B: Oh, man. Uh, yes. I've worked with many, many comp plans, and early in my career, I worked for one company in particular that had a commission plan that was so complex that both the quotas and the comp structure weren't sent out until Q2, which is, my current company, unheard of. Uh, you know, quotas go out the first week of January. People know how they're getting paid within the first couple weeks. So to me, this, like, hurts my soul to even say this. Um, but the comp plan and the details of the quotas were so complicated. The reps were spending a ridiculous amount of time asking questions about their quotas. How are they set? Why were they getting paid this way on this deal? And why were they getting paid that way on this, that deal? And when am I going to get paid? And reps were losing so much trust in the system and they were focusing so much on their comp plan that they weren't prospecting and selling. And in addition, I was spending my days answering these questions and not completing what I needed to get done. So I was losing my productivity and not completing my other responsibilities. And if you think about comp, in theory, if it's working well, yes, you have to, you know, spend time building the plans and setting quotas generally at the end of the year, and then you have to get them out at the beginning. But if it's working well, you know, in ops, you focus at the end of the year or in the months when they're getting paid, and then you have some time to work on other things. And that was not the case in this. So you're losing reps productivity and then you're losing OPS productivity. And it's just this vicious cycle. And it was at that time of, you know, commissions should be simple. Reps should know how they're getting paid, when they're getting paid. And they should also have trust that if there's a mistake, it's going to be fixed quickly and it's going to be fixed accurately. And that wasn't happening here, obviously, and we have it, too. There might be some complexity in plans because you need to tie plans to what the company needs to achieve, but that should be clear. It should be understood, and the reps should trust that it's going to be taken care of. And so that's when I learned in my career that the simpler the better for everyone.

Speaker A: There's just the instinct for everyone that has done comp more than once will kind of get to that conclusion. But there's often a lot of pressure from outside, even CRO, cfo, and they just think everything needs to be in the plan because if it's important and it's not in the plan, then it's not important. And, um, it's just a big. I mean, you're nodding along. I'm sure you've had that experience trying to explain. Well, just because we care about it doesn't mean that everything needs to be planned. There's a finite set of things that need to be in the plan, et cetera. So it's a battle that I think a lot of us in our profession sort of fight over and over again every time they come across a new leader.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, and, you know, sales can't solve all the problems too, you know, so it's boiling it down to what can sales do? Um, you know, what can they sell and what can we drive action through with those plans? Because there are some things the company needs to get done that a comp plan's not going to solve for. So what are those things that we need sales to do to help hit certain targets? And then what else in the company are we going to have to rely on other functions for?

Speaker A: So, yeah, that makes sense. As you sit down and before you open a spreadsheet and start putting in numbers to build a plan, what are those first few things you look at? Um, it's probably not just the revenue target and spread across. Like, what's your philosophy to building plants?

Speaker B: Man, this is. It's a bigger question. So at our company, this is something else I'm really proud of. So we actually start with the overall strategy. And so we start planning for our next year and Q3 of the current year. And the leadership team, the senior leadership, gets together and they say, what are we going to do in the next year? Uh, and they decide what we're going to do, and they decide on those goals and the key levers we're going to achieve to get there. And based on those levers, they're delegating them to each of the business groups, including sales. And this goes back to. What I was just saying is sales can't solve all of our problems. So it's nice that our leadership team understands that too. Right. Um, we should all be aligned and everything should work together, but sales can only do so much. And then the comp plans are looked at to make sure that the structure of the plans fits that strategy. And if it doesn't, what changes are needed to it? Or do we need to add a certain plan type to help support it? And then based on that, everything is discussed with the leadership team. And then simultaneously we're doing a bottoms up and a top downs revenue plan. Once those revenue targets are final, we'll look at what bookings numbers are needed to achieve those targets, how they're allocated to each team, who gets what comp plan and then what quotas should be set to support them. So long before we're even looking at revenue target bookings quotas, we're looking at the strategy, what we need sales to do, and then how do those comp plans fit with those? And then we'll look at the numbers that go with them. So the numbers are almost like towards the end of it, before we're in spreadsheets and looking at territories and how everything come up.

Speaker A: That's amazing. Yeah, that's. I think you've described the right way of doing things, which, um, congratulations. From getting to the point where that's possible, obviously, uh, a team effort. Right. You can't do that on your own. As an ops person, you need to have finance come along and sales leadership as well. Senior leadership, Char. Like it really is a team effort. But when planning is done well and early and starting from the strategy. Yeah. A lot of things become possible that can make things a lot smoother. I mean, it's always tricky, there's always gotchas, it's always complicated, but at least you have that clear North Star where things should go. So let's say you have a good direction, you've built a plan. Uh, sometimes see that plans, even if they're built with the right strategy in mind and well thought out, there might still be examples where certain KPIs that were put in there were looked amazing on paper. And then at the time that you run, it actually doesn't point out to anything that you wanted to support. I wonder, do you have any anecdotes or stories about when that has happened in your career? It's always useful to hear those for the broader audience.

Speaker B: Yes, not so much here, uh, at my current company, but definitely, um, at a previous company. And it wasn't so much with sales, but, um, with SDRs. So sales development reps, you know, their primary function is Generating leads for salespeople. So they're picking up the phone all day, they're calling people, and their main priority is setting meetings for the sales team. And so we had built a plan that was, we need you to set meetings and we will pay for the meetings that you set. Right. Um, and we thought it was great. What was missed was the qualification of those meetings. So when you set the meeting, you need to qualify this meeting and make sure that it's a good lead with the salesperson. So a sales accepted lead. And so what ended up happening was on paper, these SDRs were, oh, look at all these meetings, and we're hitting our quotas and we're getting paid all this money. And what was actually happening was the meetings weren't very good and the leads weren't very good. Lesson learned.

Speaker A: Um, it happens to the best of us. There's many variations of that. I had a similar thing happen to me where qualification was kind of okay. But the problem was there's a data quality issue before. So some of those meetings and leads were actually not net new to the sales team. So we had SDR celebrating their goals and then sales saying, well, these are the same people I've talked to a bunch of times already, so why does it even count? So, yeah, so good, good lesson there. To really think things through and understand that the KPI needs to move the needle and just spend the time on that and probably pivot if it doesn't just quickly recover from that sdr. It's also interesting to consider the pay mix and the balance for different roles. I know we've talked before about you guys being at a 5050 OTE, and you're not necessarily loving that. Maybe. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Speaker B: Uh, I should clarify. So 5050 is great in some roles, and at Axway, I think it works really, really well. So in the instance of, say a farmer role, where an account rep has a book of business that's very established and their role is to upsell, cross sell their existing base, a, uh, 5050 makes sense because, you know, they don't need to be as hungry because they have their existing accounts. They have the contacts in the accounts. You know, they. Their responsibility is to grow the account. So with that 50 base and 50 OTV, it's a good balance. But on, say, a new business rep, where their responsibility is to go out there and find new customers, in my opinion, I am not in sales and I should never be in sales because I'm not good at it. It's Harder. You um, do have to make new contacts, you have to make all of these new connections and you don't have that book of business to rely on. So if you were to move say to a 30 base, 70% OTV, the motivation changes a little bit. Right? You don't have this base to rely on, um, base salary to rely on and you have this larger otv. So if you are selling more and you happen to bring in those new customers, you are getting paid more. So the motivation changes when you need to get those new reps. Whereas if you're selling those new customers and it's 50, 50, you do have that comfort of that 50% base. And yeah, I could go get more, but I can also have that 50 here. So I'm a big believer depending on the role, that the mix between the otv, um, and the base should change based on what you need the rep to do. Because if you get too comfortable, they might not go out and do something that's a little hard. And that's, that's how I feel about it. And every once in a while in my company I, I bring that up and they're like, Stacy, we're going to sit stick with the 50 50, which is fine, it works.

Speaker A: Um, but no, I see what you're

Speaker B: saying, you know, so I think the

Speaker A: important piece is here. The people shouldn't get comfortable just because they're getting 50%. And there's breed of salespeople that would never be comfortable with 50% even if the 50% happened to be a number that other roles would be happy to get as their whole thing. Uh, but the other thing I would just add on to that is that if you, you need to have that management on top of the plan. Another example of the plan is not going to handle everything. So you have someone that's consistently hitting 60% of their variable. That's not really good enough and they probably need to be managed into a different situation, managed out of the company. Um, so the payments is one lever we have and it's an important one and I see where you're coming from and I definitely agree in principle. Different roles do need different pay mixes for sure. But yeah, 3070 would be an interesting one on a sales I'd like, if you ever do it, give me a call, we'll see how it plays out.

Speaker B: I've worked at startups before where it was even like 2080. Um, so you know, mine is more just maybe we could inch it and see the outcome. But I don't think I'll ever win. Um, which is fine.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's. I mean, the other. There's just think out loud here. You can also get some of the same effect by nudging it a little bit down, but then making those accelerators really aggressive and attractive. So you're really pushing for that higher performance and again, maybe making sure that you're performance managing people, which is a great segue to the next topic. I wanted to talk to you because this is just that whole idea of sales team churn. Um, and I know if you had some periods of higher churn than normal or that you would have wanted, and that's a tendency to think, well, is the ground falling off under us? Why is everyone leaving? Or is it maybe a blessing in disguise? So tell us a little bit about your experience with high churn and how did you cope with it?

Speaker B: Yeah, and you know, uh, we do have a little bit higher and we are in a SaaS company. So I did do a quick, uh, Google. So thanks to Google AI for this. So, you know, the average churn and a SaaS company is, I think, 25 to 30% per year and we might have been slightly above that. So it's still an uncomfortable number. Right. Like, you see that and you're like, oh, my goodness, like the opportunity cost of like bringing someone on and training them and just the churn there. But I do think that it is healthy for a company to see some churn and I do think that a comp plan drives some of that. Right. Like in our company, the way we set up the comp plans is if you're selling, you're going to earn money and you can earn a lot of money. And if you're not, you're not going to earn money. We set it up that way because we want you selling and we want you selling in a certain way. Um, it's aligned to our strategy, it's aligned to what we need you to do in order for the company to be successful, for us to be successful, for our shareholders to be happy, then if you can't do that, then maybe you can go and make more money somewhere else. And as a sales rep, that's exactly what you are wired to do, is you should want to go and make more money. And so from my perspective is even though we're seeing that churn, these salespeople can go and they can go and be successful somewhere else. And I truly hope that they are because that's what they're wired to do. And it gives us the opportunity to bring in some really good talent. And we are very, very fortunate that our talent acquisition team is really fantastic. We have a really good culture, we have a great product, we have a really good sales leadership team. And so the talent that we have brought in in the past two years has been fantastic. You know, I've already seen really good deals come in from reps that we've hired at the beginning of the year. They fit in with the culture. So the team is really starting to gel. Um, and so when you see those higher turnover numbers, it makes you, your stomach churn a little bit. But at the same time, when you see that you're able to bring in really good talent that is gelling and able to sell the product and that aligns with the comp plan and the strategy and able to do what it was designed to do, it makes you feel good that that's, you know, that's how it was designed and what you want it to be.

Speaker A: I get it. It always feels like a bit of a failure. Someone leaves the company or has to leave the company, but in reality, no job is forever and if it's going to happen, it's better to have it happen soon. It's better for everyone. For the person leaving for the company, you have a chance to backfill quickly. Curious, do you distinguish between sort of regrettable churn and non regrettable churn or is that something you look at as a stat or. Not necessarily.

Speaker B: We don't. But you know, ultimately we want the people who are good to stay and for the most part, I think since I've been here, they do. It's, it's a great place to be. We have really long term reps that have been here for a while and even myself included. This is, I've been here the longest of all my career or all of the companies.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's, uh, no, it sounds like a really good place to be. And again, seems like you guys have your stuff organized together, you're doing things right. So that goes a long way, especially in these days of so much change and there's so much uncertainty with everything happening. So at least if the controllables are controlled and managed and thought out, it's a really good place to start from. Back on the, on the trust topic, as, as reps, they get the plan, it's simple, it's understandable. They get it, they go out into the world, they do it. And then what's your policy around reviewing deals when they're closing to make sure that people get paid. Right. Is this something that happens mostly automatically and, and what do you think the level of trust is with reps today and how do you plan to improve that or is if it needs to improve, yes.

Speaker B: It is incredibly important here that we pay accurately and timely. So both the operations and the commissions team spend a lot of time to make sure that that happens. So every month at close, the operations team, the global operations team, reviews every single deal. They have built a power bi dashboard. It's gorgeous. And it has every plan type, it pulls in the deals that had been sold and the prior month to make sure that, you know, m the deal payment matches what's coming from Salesforce. That matches what's in exactly. That matches what we expect the payment to be. Then we can see, you know, does there need to be an exception? So that's coming from global Ops at the regional ops letter, uh, level. We track all of the exceptions. So when they're tracked and noted, because that's important. Um, and then we can go in and make sure that, you know, they're being paid accurately. And then on the commission side, obviously they're going through and checking and making sure that everything is properly being paid in the system. So it's really important that all of that is done because we need the reps to trust that they're getting paid accurately. And as always, there are sometimes mistakes. Um, but those are remedied within the month and they're paid in the next payroll. So a lot of work has been done over the past several years since I've been here on how do we check these deals to make sure sure that the reps feel confident that they're getting paid accurately and on time?

Speaker A: Um, no, totally. I mean, as you say, it's important there. It's important everywhere. Like that is the one thing that everyone really cares a lot about. Um, and it's incredible when we talk with customers and prospects and people that are on older systems, the amount of effort that has to go into making things right. And there's a bit of a unsung hero here. There's a ton of comp people that really spend crazy amount of times really. And it's just work that no one sees it. It's worth it. It's incredibly important if you need to do it. But it's also avoidable but better tools. So yeah, if you have to do it, you have to do it. It's incredibly important. Now, question thinking out loud here. If you were to recover those, if that was easier to do, would there be other things that you or your team could be spending time on instead of those reviews.

Speaker B: I mean always. Right. And I will say I, I don't do as much of it as uh, the global ops team and the commissions team. But you know, I know the global ops team does spend a lot of time especially like building the dashboards and reviewing it. There's always time. They could be building other dashboards or getting other systems in place, um, in Power bi, fixing other things that are broke within the company. You know, there's always that trade off there. So there's that opportunity cost 100%.

Speaker A: It makes sense. But yeah, again you just, you have to do it. It's a non negotiable thing. Trust is just so hard to build up, so easy to lose that it just has to happen. Okay, shifting gears a little bit, I want to. Just because you've had such an interesting trajectory and you've moved across industries and company sizes, I just want to pick your brain a bit on what are things that as companies ah, grow into from sort of startups into more enterprise. Maybe examples of things that would have worked before earlier in some startup level that are now completely off the table for public company enterprise level. Like any lessons you have on that front would be amazing to hear.

Speaker B: Yes. Um, so my favorite plan I've ever done was at a startup and this was one where they weren't paying the reps very much on the base. So the direction I was given on the plan was pay them. And so really it was, you know, exponential payment, um, all the way through. So you sold a deal, you got paid a percent and then the tiering was right off the bat. So it was this like hockey stick of just like whoop. Uh, whereas in an enterprise you have that OTV constraint. So you're kind of earning and then you can earn once you hit your quota. Um, and so in the startup, because you're just trying to get as much, you know, many, as many deals in the new customers, as much, um, bookings as you can into the company, you get to build these plans that really have unlimited earning potential and you have these reps that are so hungry because they aren't really earning a whole lot on the base side. Um, and so they're fun plans to build and if you were to put that on the enterprise side one, it's very hard to forecast to manage costs. Um, you know, just with uncapped earning potential and having a lot of reps, um, it's, it's almost impossible to bring in. You need to have the structure of the otv. But on the startup side it works very, very well because you have the hungry reps. They are, they have that unlimited earning potential so they have the motivation to go out. So two different models, um, they both work for what is needed in the company.

Speaker A: Good example. I had a similar one. It was more of a mid market company, but it's a big transformation point. So we wanted to move all the customers in one year from one thing to another. And um, we put together a really aggressive plan for the renewals team that was typically more on a much higher base, lower variable because it was more procedural, the renewals. And this time we sort of convert them all into salespeople for the year and they went out and made a killing. A killing. And the company did really well, achieved the goal like 91% of the customers transition in the year and people took home checks like half a million dollars. It was just amazing. And people that were making 70, 80, 90k before and it was, yeah, super exciting to do and definitely fun one day.

Speaker B: Fun.

Speaker A: Yeah. Cool. All right, second to last question here. Just wanted to get your read on, um, adjusting plans mid cycle. If you're. I mean part of the job we do is just we put out the plan. We hopefully it's, it's well developed, it's supporting the strategy, it's well communicated, it's out in the world and then sometimes things happen that you just realize halfway through or earlier, ideally that things are a bit off. What's your take on going back and adjusting plans or just sticking with it? Any, any guidance here, but, but great to hear.

Speaker B: Oh, uh, man. It honestly goes back to my trust and I am a big believer in not changing plans once the plan is set. It is set. Even in my SDR example, as much as it pained me, um, you know, that was the plan. That's what we communicated and that's what we did. Um, and I feel the same way with sales plans. If you change a plan mid year, it sets the example of we could do this again. So even if the company is not doing well and you change the plan for better, um, what happens if the company is doing really, really well in the next year? Are you going to change the plan mid year and make it harder? I have however, changed quotas, I've changed territories. If something happens there, um, to make it, you know, easier, harder or more fair that I've done. But I've never changed a plan structure mid cycle because I do think that again, that breaks stress. So once the plan is set. It is set for the year, and then adjustments are made the next year. That's how I feel about it. Um, and it just ultimately comes down to trust.

Speaker A: I mean, I think you said it really well. Yeah. If the company's doing really well, would you make the plans harder or. No, you wouldn't. But I mean, adjusting quotas, I mean, that is one way that's it's. It's not full on changing the plan, but it kind of is. You're just making it a bit of a soft landing if needed. And then I've had, and we've seen examples of just augmenting via Spiffs or other incentives that are just sort of helping people really pay the bills. While there are things that are especially external to the company that are really weird, because losing talent for that reason would be really bad, especially if you can see light at the end of the tunnel and it's a control situation. But I'm with you, uh, principle. Try to not do it and stick to the plan as much as possible. All right, well, last question. The topic of 2026 and beyond. Let's get into AI a little bit. Um, I know your company does a lot of work with AI. You're helping enterprises govern AI through your gateway. So you obviously have a unique vantage point here to know what happens when AI is deployed, right or wrong, without guardrails. But if we think about that inwards in our role as rebops, uh, or comm people, how do you see the role of AI for this? Do you think LLM could ever design a comp plan for you and what would keep you up at night if that was the case?

Speaker B: Man, AI. It's so cool and so scary, which is why we have a product that helps govern it. But so the way I see it right now is with AI, it's only as good as the Large Learning model or the LLM, um, that it sits on. Right. So it's just a bunch of data that goes into it. So with our comp plans at our core, we don't change our core comp plan very much. So with the Large Learning model, if we were to feed all of our comp plans, it would probably spit out a comp plan that was very similar to what we've done in the past. What it would get wrong, though, is all of the nuances that tie to the strategy. So in our comp plans, every once in a while, we'll pay more for a certain product or we'll pay more for a type of deal. We also have a sales policy that details out, you know, how reps are going to get paid, all of the, you know, nuances of a plan. Um, if we have to add a certain type of plan that might be a little more complex, you know, different types of deals, how we manage them. And it is this beautiful document that the, the man who goes through it every year is amazing and spends so much time on it and leadership reviews. So that is done every year. We have all of these strategy discussions and that is the stuff that the LLM wouldn't have unless we uploaded that document and then the LLM was listening to all of the strategy conversations. And even then you're trusting a machine to, you know, off of those documents and spit them out. So you would still need to have human intervention to make sure that everything aligned. So AI, ah, is cool. Um, and I think it would get close, but you would still need to have the human part of it to make sure that aligned to the strategy. Because we're all human and humans think differently and especially salespeople. Right. To make sure that it would drive salespeople to do what they needed to do.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I think you're spot on. There's, I mean, there's near future where, especially with, if a lot of these strategy meetings are happening on Zoom already, you could feed all those transcripts back into the machine and have a really cool, super detailed context built into that. Um, I think it's worth exploring. Yeah, definitely. You'd want to still review the plants obviously, and build them out, but, but just get that. I think as a, as a third party kind of observer, that could provide some input that would be valuable if you can get that context built in. For sure. Uh, where we shy away from the AI's on the comp side, on the calculation side of comp and payout calcs. My view is that there's, first of all, it's deterministic. There's formulas, there's like, you don't need AI to do it. You don't want a black box to spit out a number. You need to be able to trace exactly how the calculation happened, be able to audit it, report back on it, like just really understand. And I think that's an area where you don't want creative juices flowing. For that you need, this is a plan. These are the rules. Go apply those rules straight on. But I see a, uh, potential on exploring just other areas as things continue to get better. But yeah, scary and exciting for sure.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: Yeah. All right. Well, Stacy, thank you so much for being here. You had a really good conversation. I, uh, just want to wrap it up. I think a lot of what we talked about comes back to this idea of trust. The importance of trust. How reps trust the plan when it's simple. They need to trust that the payout is accurate, and they need to trust the team and the person delivering it. And, um, that is an area that's actually, we should spend more time on that than necessarily on building the models on, um, the comp plans. It's where the relive. What happens is building that legacy of trust. And it sounds like you've nailed it. So congratulations. It's been inspirational to chat with you.

Speaker B: Well, thank you so much. And it is absolutely the team here. It's not just me, A, uh, strong leadership team and strong peers that make it all happen. But thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Speaker A: Excellent. Thanks. Thanks again, Stacey, for being on the Go to Master Show, Season 4. For everyone listening, uh, if this conversation sparked something, leave us a review on Spotify or Apple podcasts and connect with Stacy or me in LinkedIn. See you on the next one.