Team Manager, Sales Incentives (Global)

About the role

The Team Manager, Sales Incentives (Global) is responsible for leading the day-to-day operations of Pearson's global Sales Incentives function, ensuring the successful execution of incentive programs across all business units and sales organizations. This role serves as the operational leader for the Incentives organization, partnering closely with Sales Leadership, Finance, HR, Payroll, Business Units, RevOps, and Technology teams to deliver accurate, timely, and compliant incentive plans and payouts. The Senior Manager will oversee the complete operational lifecycle of sales compensation, including implementation, governance, payout processing, exception management, and continuous process improvement. The role also provides direct leadership to the Incentives team, driving operational excellence, developing talent, establishing scalable processes, and ensuring consistent execution across the enterprise. Working in partnership with the Head of Enablement and Incentives, this role enables executive leadership to focus on long-term strategy, sales enablement transformation, governance, and enterprise commercial initiatives while ensuring flawless operational delivery.

Key Responsibilities

• Incentive Operations Leadership: Lead the day-to-day execution of Pearson's global Sales Incentive programs by managing operational delivery of all Sales Incentive Plans across Pearson, overseeing monthly and quarterly incentive calculation and payout processes, ensuring payroll readiness and on-time accurate incentive payments, managing operational calendars/milestones/service level commitments, monitoring execution risks and proactively resolving issues, and driving operational consistency across all Business Units.
• Business Unit Partnership: Serve as the primary operational partner for Business Units by leading implementation planning and execution, coordinating plan rollouts and communications, managing operational timelines and deliverables, partnering with Sales Leadership on incentive execution, providing consultation on operational questions and issue resolution, and ensuring alignment between business priorities and incentive administration.
• Sales Incentive Governance: Support enterprise governance by maintaining Sales Incentive policies and operational standards, leading approval workflows for incentive plans and exceptions, ensuring compliance with governance requirements, supporting audit readiness and documentation, and maintaining operational controls and risk management practices.
• Sales Performance Management (SPM): Oversee operational management of the Sales Performance Management platform by coordinating incentive plan implementation, supporting system testing and validation, managing production releases, partnering with Technology and vendors, ensuring data quality and system accuracy, and driving automation opportunities.
• Payout Processing: Oversee end-to-end incentive payment operations by reviewing calculation outputs, validating payout accuracy, coordinating payroll submissions, resolving payment issues, managing payout approvals, and supporting finance reconciliation.
• People Leadership: Lead and develop a high-performing Incentives team through direct people management, coaching and mentoring, performance management, hiring and onboarding, career development, capacity planning, succession planning, and employee engagement. Create an environment focused on accountability, collaboration, continuous improvement, and operational excellence.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Finance, Human Resources, Operations, or related field
• 8+ years of experience in Sales Compensation, Sales Incentives, Commercial Operations, RevOps, or Sales Operations
• 3+ years leading high-performing teams
• Experience administering complex global sales incentive programs
• Strong understanding of sales compensation principles and incentive plan design
• Experience working with Sales Performance Management (SPM) platforms (such as Varicent, Xactly, Spiff, CaptivateIQ, or similar)
• Strong analytical and financial acumen
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional initiatives
• Excellent executive communication and stakeholder management skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting multinational sales organizations
• Experience leading compensation governance
• Knowledge of payroll operations
• Experience supporting audit and compliance activities
• Advanced Excel and data analytics skills
• Experience leading enterprise transformation initiatives

Pay

The minimum full-time salary range is between $150,000 - $170,000. This position is eligible to participate in an annual incentive program.