Before the transformation, Doug (head of sales) inherited a sales organization built on what the team calls the "financial print model": reps operated against personal, siloed books of business, with almost no middle-management layer (one leader alone had 90 direct reports). Compensation and identity were tied to the rep's own client relationships and revenue, not to a shared platform.
The consequence for the transformation: any dollar redirected toward product development was felt by reps as a dollar taken directly out of their own client-facing budget — a structural, zero-sum framing that made sales resistant to funding the platform investment the company needed. This incentive wiring is the reason trust between sales and product had to be built deliberately and personally rather than assumed.
Related: Culture Bank (Trust Reserve for Crises), Go-to-Market Strategy.
Sales's resistance to diverting budget toward building the product organization wasn't simply turf-guarding — under the financial-print, book-of-business compensation model, every dollar redirected to product was, from an individual rep's point of view, a dollar literally removed from their own account-level spending power. The incentive structure made resistance to funding product a locally rational response to a real, personal financial trade-off, not just an emotional or political reaction to change.
This matters for how the resistance had to be addressed: explaining the long-term product vision alone couldn't fix it, since the short-term math for an individual rep didn't change. It had to be addressed through the trust and relationship-building captured in Culture Bank (Trust Reserve for Crises) and Win-Together Culture (Breaking Down Silos) — reps needed to believe the org-level trade was worth the personal one.
Apply: when a compensation model ties an individual's spending power directly to their own book of business, expect rational (not just cultural) resistance to reallocating budget away from that book, and address it as a trust/incentive problem, not only a communication problem.
Из тем: Transformation in Practice