Sales Compensation Design Manager,

USA TODAY Co., Inc. is a diversified media company with expansive reach at the national and local level dedicated to empowering and enriching communities. We seek to inspire, inform, and connect audiences as a sustainable, growth-focused media and digital marketing solutions company. Through our trusted brands, including the USA TODAY NETWORK and Newsquest in the United Kingdom, we provide essential journalism, local content, and digital experiences to audiences and businesses.

About the role

As our Sales Compensation Manager, you'll own the strategy, design, governance, and evolution of our sales incentive programs. You'll partner directly with Sales Leadership, Finance, HR, and executive stakeholders to create compensation plans that motivate the right behaviors, support business strategy, and drive measurable results. This role focuses on designing compensation strategies rather than calculating payouts or processing commissions.

Responsibilities

• Partner with Sales Leadership to translate business priorities into effective sales compensation strategies.
• Design annual and in-year incentive plans, including performance measures, quotas, thresholds, accelerators, decelerators, payout curves, SPIFFs, and role-specific incentive structures.
• Continuously evaluate whether plans are driving the intended seller behaviors and business outcomes.
• Develop financial and behavioral models to evaluate new incentive ideas before implementation. Analyze business impact, cost, seller behavior, pay-for-performance alignment, and ROI.
• Own governance for all sales compensation programs, including plan documentation, policy interpretation, exception governance, audit readiness, and change management.
• Ensure plans remain scalable, understandable, equitable, and operationally executable.
• Partner with operations teams responsible for implementation while maintaining ownership of plan intent and governance.
• Act as a trusted advisor to Sales Leadership, Finance, HR, Revenue Operations, and Payroll to shape compensation strategy.
• Challenge assumptions, present data-driven recommendations, and influence executive decision-making.
• Evaluate seller attainment, incentive effectiveness, plan competitiveness, and business outcomes. Continuously refine programs to improve performance, simplicity, and long-term scalability.

Requirements

• Experience personally designing sales compensation plans, not just administering them.
• Understanding of how compensation influences seller behavior and business performance.
• Ability to discuss financial models with Finance and compensation strategy with Sales Leadership.
• Balance innovation with governance and operational simplicity.

This role is not focused on routine commission processing, payroll administration, calculating monthly payouts, or maintaining commission systems as the primary responsibility.

Pay

The annualized base salary for this role will range between $110,000 and $130,000. Base compensation is reflective of many factors, including market, education level, skills, certifications, and experience. Variable compensation may also apply.