This year’s ever-changing U.S. economic policy landscape is presenting organizations across North America (and more broadly) with a new set of challenges, particularly in how they design and administer their rewards programs for sales professionals.
We sought to understand how businesses are adjusting their talent and rewards strategies in response to these developments via a May 2025 Sales Compensation Pulse Survey. Reflecting responses from 166 organizations in the United States and Canada, the results captured a snapshot of current market sentiment.
We acknowledge that the economic environment is fluid and dynamic. However, these findings provide valuable insights into how organizations are planning to respond to ongoing tariff-related uncertainty. Overall, the results show that many companies are bracing for the fallout from continued economic uncertainty:
We explored sales compensation programs to gain an understanding of early changes in response to economic policy shifts. These programs, often separate and distinct from corporate short- and long-term incentive plans, typically are customized and have a significantly larger weight on variable, at-risk compensation than their corporate cousins. This design choice is intended to align sales professionals’ compensation with the company's top-line performance.
With economic shocks or influences, at-risk pay for sales roles can be impacted beyond the control of the individual sellers’ influence. These plans are intentionally designed to have a high degree of payout volatility — but with the intention that volatility links to individual performance, not economic shocks.
So, what do companies do about that? Let it ride? Most often yes, but for major external impacts (e.g., COVID) some organizations tend to consider changes to protect volatility. Some even shift performance expectations with goal resets, changes to performance metrics, performance thresholds, payout timing, perhaps even the anticipated use of discretion — there are many levers to work with when it comes to customized sales compensation plans.
Have organizations already started thinking about changes? Or is everyone still using a wait-and-see strategy, given rapidly evolving policy development and the element of the unknown. Our survey uncovered that, while most companies have not made immediate changes to their sales compensation programs, some are beginning to contemplate adjustments.
This careful approach is not surprising given the delicate balance organizations must strike between ensuring the best alignment of strategy and roles, setting the right plan components in place to recognize the roles’ influence on sales, drive the right behaviors, strive for fairness — and limit disruption in the field. For these reasons, we expect most organizations, at least at this stage, are cautious about introducing change. The survey findings support this expectation.
However, the current impacts might be described as above-and-beyond business as usual and a significant percentage of companies have already made changes or have planned changes to their sales compensation programs.
While few companies have fully implemented these changes, the survey indicates more movement than anticipated in the realm of sales compensation programs.
Clearly, businesses across North America are carefully monitoring and adapting to the evolving economic policies and their implications for rewards programs, including for sales professionals.
