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Faculty

Erik Charles

MBA
Dean's Leadership Circle Charter Member
The Paul Merage School of Business

Erik W. Charles is Head of Revenue at Variabl, an AI-native incentive compensation platform, and the founder of Braided Line Advisory. He has spent more than three decades building and fixing revenue engines, and his through-line has never changed: sales will do what you pay them to do. The carrot is the stick.
Erik started as a management consultant designing incentive plans, then ran compensation for a division at Sun Microsystems. He joined Callidus as an early employee, where he worked on the company's first live implementation at Netscape and closed its first international deal at Westpac in Australia. He then spent over a decade at Xactly, rising from product marketing to Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Evangelist, with a stop in between as VP of Business Operations leading the company's Japan expansion.
Across that career he has designed hundreds of commission plans for sales teams of every size, industry, and geography. He has also seen how often a comp plan drives the wrong behavior, rewards the wrong outcome, and then gets blamed on the market. His core argument is simple: when the number misses, look at what you paid people to do, because they did exactly that.
Erik is a frequent speaker at Dreamforce, WorldatWork, Argyle CFO forums, Sales 3.0, and the Sales Management Association, and a recurring panelist at the Thought Leadership on the Sales Profession Conference. He has guest lectured at universities around the world, including UCLA, UC Irvine, and ICFAI Business School in India. He holds a bachelor's degree from Stanford and an MBA from the Paul Merage School of Business at UC Irvine, where he serves as a mentor and charter member of the Dean's Leadership Circle.
He lives in Southern California with his wife. In his spare time he hikes, camps, stumbles into small music venues, and collects wines and whisk(e)ys.

2026 Sessions

Comp That Works —Incentive That Drive the Right Sales Behaviors

Most comp plans are built to be fair. Almost none are built to be effective. The result is a plan that looks reasonable on paper and quietly rewards the wrong behavior every single pay period.<br><br>

This session is a working diagnostic, not a lecture. Drawing on the forthcoming book The Carrot IS the Stick and decades spent designing hundreds of commission plans across industries, Erik W. Charles walks through how to read your own incentive plan the way it actually performs in the field. You will learn where plans break, why the rep is almost never the problem, and how a few specific changes to line of sight and plan design can move the number.
The argument rests on more than experience. Erik braids in the academic research on motivation and incentives, from Locke on goal setting to Condly's meta-analysis showing measurable average performance gains, and translates it into plain language you can use Monday morning. Sales will do what you pay them to do. This session is about making sure that is the thing you actually want.<br><br>
Attendees will leave with:<br>

- A method for stress-testing an existing comp plan to find where it drives the wrong behavior before it costs a quarter <br>
- The research-backed principle of line of sight, and how to rebuild the link between a rep's daily actions and their payout <br>
- A clear way to tell a measurement problem from a culture problem, so you fix the plan instead of blaming the team
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Track Sponsored By: <img src=https://naccme.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/SMASH+2026/Rilla+logo+(1).png alt="Upload Image" width="200" /></p>

Presenter

Tuesday, October 06 9:00–9:45 AM
Room Marquis 4
Sales Strategy and Management
Faculty

Erik Charles

MBA
Dean's Leadership Circle Charter Member
The Paul Merage School of Business

Erik W. Charles is Head of Revenue at Variabl, an AI-native incentive compensation platform, and the founder of Braided Line Advisory. He has spent more than three decades building and fixing revenue engines, and his through-line has never changed: sales will do what you pay them to do. The carrot is the stick.
Erik started as a management consultant designing incentive plans, then ran compensation for a division at Sun Microsystems. He joined Callidus as an early employee, where he worked on the company's first live implementation at Netscape and closed its first international deal at Westpac in Australia. He then spent over a decade at Xactly, rising from product marketing to Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Evangelist, with a stop in between as VP of Business Operations leading the company's Japan expansion.
Across that career he has designed hundreds of commission plans for sales teams of every size, industry, and geography. He has also seen how often a comp plan drives the wrong behavior, rewards the wrong outcome, and then gets blamed on the market. His core argument is simple: when the number misses, look at what you paid people to do, because they did exactly that.
Erik is a frequent speaker at Dreamforce, WorldatWork, Argyle CFO forums, Sales 3.0, and the Sales Management Association, and a recurring panelist at the Thought Leadership on the Sales Profession Conference. He has guest lectured at universities around the world, including UCLA, UC Irvine, and ICFAI Business School in India. He holds a bachelor's degree from Stanford and an MBA from the Paul Merage School of Business at UC Irvine, where he serves as a mentor and charter member of the Dean's Leadership Circle.
He lives in Southern California with his wife. In his spare time he hikes, camps, stumbles into small music venues, and collects wines and whisk(e)ys.
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