Nacho Pavez manages incentive compensation across LatAm for a global SaaS company — 200+ commissionable reps, 15+ plan families, countries with different payday schedules. We sat down with him to talk about what actually causes commission errors, why the role is more cross-functional than most people realize, and what it would take to make AI useful in comp without creating a security problem. Here’s what stood out.
“Accuracy in commissions is almost never about what happens during calculation. It’s about everything that happened before.”
On where disconnects actually come from:
Six years ago, the errors were manual — wrong data, human mistakes, spreadsheet chaos. With a modern CRM and a dedicated Sales Ops team, those are mostly gone. What remains is misalignment: a rep who expects to be paid on an account their territory doesn’t cover, a comp plan rule that finance wrote one way and sales understood another. The gap between plan design and rep expectation is where most disputes are born — and it opens up long before payout time.
“The commission cycle doesn’t end when I run the calculation. It ends when the rep sees the correct number in their bank account.”
On what the commission cycle actually requires:
Getting there requires weekly syncs with Sales Ops leadership, a tight cross-functional calendar, and real visibility into CRM data flows. The commissions role, Nacho argues, genuinely requires understanding HR processes, ramp metrics, territory design, and data architecture. It touches more departments than most job descriptions suggest.
“If the big leadership just believes commissions is about calculating things, we have a problem.”
On commissions as a strategic function:
When leadership makes decisions about new comp plans, new market expansions, or seasonal campaigns without looping in the commissions team, the problems show up at payout time. Commissions drives behavior — what gets sold, which markets get prioritized, whether the sales force stays motivated. Treat it as a back-office calculation job and the team spends its time cleaning up decisions that were made without them.
“Whether AI can help with commissions isn’t the question. The question is what happens to the data.”
On AI — security is the actual barrier:
Nacho uses AI constantly in his personal work. At the company level, the challenge isn’t capability — it’s that commission data is highly sensitive: who earns what, across which deals, in which regions. Until an organization has clear security policies around where that data can go, feeding it into external AI tools creates more risk than it resolves. The organizations that solve that first will have a real advantage.
TOP BYTES
“Accuracy in commissions is almost never about what happens during calculation. It’s about everything that happened before.”
“The commission cycle doesn’t end when I run the calculation. It ends when the rep sees the correct number in their bank account.”
“If the big leadership just believes commissions is about calculating things, we have a problem. It’s super complex.”
“The gap between plan design and rep expectation is where most commission disputes are born.”
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