Finance and revenue are about to become the most important relationship in go-to-market. Jacki Leahy’s playbook for aligning them starts where incentives actually live: the comp plan.
Most go-to-market teams obsess over the gap between sales and marketing. Jacki Leahy thinks the next gap to close is bigger: finance and revenue.
Jacki is a Fractional RevOps Leader and the founder of Activate the Magic, and she has spent her career in the wiring between the two. As revenue roles consolidate and usage-based pricing makes every dollar harder to predict, she argues finance has quietly become one of the most powerful seats in the company, and the comp plan is where the two functions finally have to speak the same language.
This is her playbook for using compensation as the alignment layer: how to fix the definitions that quietly break trust, how to read a business’s real priorities from its comp plan, and how to design incentives that get everyone playing the same game, with tools like QuotaPath and its AI Revenue Strategist Atlas keeping the plan legible and adjustable as the story changes.
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Use Atlas for FreeWhy finance and revenue keep talking past each other
Ask a revenue team what their single source of truth is for bookings, Jacki says, and they’ll tell you Salesforce. Bring that to the CFO and they’ll laugh, because early on the real numbers live in a Google Sheet, then NetSuite, and the two sides rarely reconcile.
Finance as a blanket has become a little resigned when it comes to revenue leadership, because we’re imprecise and we use exclamation points. And revenue has sort of given up on finance because they don’t understand.
The root cause is almost embarrassingly basic: definitions and rules of engagement. What counts as new business versus renewal versus expansion. How you define churn, or NRR. Whether you’re measuring ARR or MRR when half the model is usage. Teams assume these are standard. They aren’t, and nobody writes them down.
Add duplicate records, shadow CRMs, and a half-dozen lead sources, and you don’t have an attribution problem so much as a vocabulary problem. Until finance and revenue share a data dictionary, every report is a different language.
Read the business from its comp plan
Jacki’s favorite way in is disarmingly direct.
Show me your compensation model, and I’ll show you what’s wrong with your business.
Comp is where a company’s real priorities become visible, because it’s what the org actually pays for, not what it says it wants. From there she ties everything back to OKRs and asks the question most revenue teams skip: is the engine being called for growth, or efficiency?
Most sales leaders assume growth, because new logos are the motion they love. But board-level priorities shift quietly, especially now. With AI credits and tool sprawl blowing up margins, the story can flip from “land more” to “prove we’re efficient,” and no one tells revenue until comp and pipeline focus are already pointed the wrong way.
So she reframes it as a narrative question: dear CFO, at the year-end board meeting, what is the story you want to tell? Then design the plan backward from that.
Jacki Leahy’s playbook for comp that aligns the org
1. Start with shared definitions
Before you touch a comp plan, write the data dictionary. Agree on what new business, renewal, upsell, churn, and NRR actually mean, and agree on it across finance, revenue, and leadership. It sounds remedial. It’s the foundation everything else sits on.
2. Decide the story: growth or efficiency
Pin down what the engine is actually being asked for this year. If it’s growth, narrow it further, new logos or expansion. If it’s efficiency, comp should reward margin, deal structure, and productivity, not just bookings. The plan should encode the story the business needs to tell.
3. Design comp as one game everyone plays
Business is a game, and winning is fun.
Reps will gamify quotes and attribution to win. Jacki’s point is to stop pretending otherwise and use it. If it can be gamified, it can be manipulated, so build the levers on purpose. When the definitions and KPIs are crisp, you can work backward and comp reps, BDRs, and marketing so that everyone may be playing different games, but every score rolls up to one. She compares it to Apple Arcade: different games, one shared score. Levers, not punishment or reward.
4. Re-tune the plan as you scale
The plan that works at $10M is not the plan that works at $50M. Early on, you’re selling the dream and rewarding effort, because elbow grease is worth more than executing something you’ve already figured out. Once you’ve found repeatability, every dollar out has to bring back five friends, and finance needs certainty that capital is on plan.
The kind of certainty you want changes with the stage. Before $10M, it’s that the people you hired will figure it out. After, it’s margins, runway, and the story you’ll tell at year end. Your comp plan, and the people it attracts, should change with it.
Why this approach works
Alignment isn’t a kickoff slide; it’s an operating system. Shared definitions make the numbers trustworthy. The growth-or-efficiency question keeps comp pointed at the real goal. Designing the game on purpose turns rep behavior into something you can steer. And re-tuning as you scale keeps finance confident that spend matches the plan. Each layer makes the next one possible, and finance and revenue finally tell the same story.
Design, track, and manage variable incentives with QuotaPath. Give your RevOps, finance, and sales teams transparency into sales compensation.
Talk to SalesFrom playbook to practice with QuotaPath and Atlas
Jacki’s playbook depends on one thing being true: the comp plan has to be legible, grounded in real data, and easy to change as the story shifts. That is what QuotaPath was built for.
QuotaPath lets teams design, run, track, and adjust comp plans in one system, so the plan stays in sync with the numbers finance actually reports. Atlas, its AI Revenue Strategist, grounds recommendations in proprietary comp and quota benchmarks from thousands of real plans, not generic guesswork, so when the question changes from growth to efficiency you can model the trade-offs and re-tune the plan with logic behind it.
That is how you turn “show me your comp plan” from a diagnosis into a control panel.
See how Atlas can pressure-test your comp plan against real benchmarks. Try Atlas
