Case Study: Unlocking Full M&A Value with a Strategic Incentive Plan

When companies grow through multiple mergers and acquisitions, compensation leaders are often left juggling a patchwork of incentive plans.

But without true strategic alignment, sales teams can stall, leaving the full promise of an M&A frustratingly out of reach.

This was the challenge we faced at a leading multi-national insurance firm. A major M&A transaction highlighted multiple, inconsistent, and legacy sales incentive plans across its divisions. Rather than adding to this complex landscape, leadership realized they needed to take a proactive strategic step before fragmentation became too entrenched.

The initial focus was on 10 key incentive plans, but it was clear our work could lay the foundation for something much bigger, which could have a much broader impact across the business.

RevenueShift developed the approach into a scalable framework that could bring structure to over 100 plans across the business. At its core was an archetype model: 2 standardized role types developed through data analysis, market benchmarking, and observed sales behaviors. The model was built to scale - going beyond the initial scope and enabling the firm to seamlessly align 80+ additional roles toa consistent, structured framework for the future.

This was never just about plan design. It was about building internal capability and embedding a consistent approach to sales incentives across the organization. The result: clarity, cohesion, and a foundation that empowered their salesforce to truly unlock the value of the merger.

The outcome was a restructured job architecture for professional services staff, correcting inflated titles and delivering a 12% overall improvement across a $600Mpayroll. At the same time, we increased pay-at-risk to better motivate teams and create the right level of performance tension.

As the Consulting Practice Leader explains, this approach drove business growth, enabled individual success, and reduced costs:

“RevenueShift challenged our assumptions and organizational inertia. The engagement allowed us to redefine what good performance looks like and create a clearer line-of-sight for all our teams to corporate and individual performance.”

Identifying barriers to sales team success  

We started by looking at a sample of roles and incentive plans across three key service lines.

Our analysis painted a clear picture of how people were getting paid, how that compared to market benchmarks and whether the plans were effectively driving business growth. This revealed a number of key issues:

●    Fragmented legacy plans – Incentives from acquired businesses were left largely unchanged, creating a patchwork of inconsistent goals, pay mixes, and expectations across and even within teams.

●    Lack of structure and transparency – Many plans had little to no formal documentation, often functioning as “handshake agreements”, which led to confusion and inequity in how employees were compensated.

●    Misaligned with growth objectives – Plans rewarded maintaining existing business rather than driving expansion and new customer acquisition, limiting their effectiveness as growth levers.

●    Operational inefficiency – The wide variety of individualized and inconsistent plans created a heavy administrative burden to manage, track, and calculate payouts accurately.

Establishing and delivering a strategic comp plan

From the outset, we focused on the toughest challenges and designed solutions that could flex and scale as the business grew.

1. Sales incentives – Our analysis and benchmarking of existing incentive plans, enabled us to build clear seller archetypes that distinguished between pure sellers and those who both sold and delivered a service. These archetypes provided a consistent foundation for structuring sales incentives, while still allowing for flexibility across business lines.

2. Annual incentive plans – Using the role archetypes as a baseline, we developed a standardized framework for variable compensation. We recommended appropriate pay mixes by role, created role-based incentive plans, and adjusted flexible parameters so each plan reflected the realities of the individual team. This ensured incentives were fair, competitive, and performance-driven.

3. Job architecture – To bring everything together, we partnered one-on-one with leaders to make sure the new plans were right for their teams. We built cost models, helped set targets and rates, and modeled how pay would change under the new structure. Finally, we equipped teams with rollout materials and implementation support, ensuring leaders could communicate clearly and employees understood both expectations and opportunities.

Together, these workstreams created an end-to-end redesign in which role clarity, fair pay, and growth-aligned incentives reinforced each other. Our hands-on approach to implementing each workstream also built internal capability, aligned stakeholders across diverse business lines, and supported change management.

Embedding incentives that drive long-term success

Our goal wasn’t just to design a new framework - it was to build one that fuels growth, scales with the business, and actually works in practice.

Key successes included:

●    Radical simplification: More than 100 incentive plans consolidated and benchmarked into 2 clear role archetypes, supported by a practical toolkit and roadmap that leaders can use with confidence day to day.

●    Time and cost savings: Standardized payment processes eliminate duplication of work and accelerate payouts from semi-annual to monthly, freeing resources while keeping sellers motivated.

●    Clarity and consistency: Clear role expectations, fair pay mixes, and consistent goal-setting gave leadership the ability to track, compare, and manage performance across the enterprise.

●    Scalable growth foundations: New acquisitions and roles can now be seamlessly integrated into a single system, eliminating the complexity that once hindered growth.

The firm now operates with a unified compensation strategy - easier to manage, ready for future growth, and closely aligned with its sales strategy.

If your organization is working with multiple legacy comp plans and ready to embed a simpler, smarter approach to incentives, let’s talk: [tom.hill@revenueshift.com]