Erik Charles

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.