The Problem
HireRight had no structured process for managing sales commissions. Sales and account managers were paid upfront based on the revenue they projected to generate from clients — regardless of whether those targets were actually met. With 500+ members across the sales and account management org, this created significant financial exposure: the company had no reliable way to know if it was paying commissions to the right people, for the right amounts, at the right time.
Leadership had visibility into neither commission spend nor its correlation to actual revenue outcomes.
The Approach
I owned this project end-to-end — from initial discovery through engineering deployment, UAT, training, and post-launch metric tracking.
Discovery revealed the core challenge wasn’t just building a form — it was reconciling new data structures with years of existing commission and revenue data that lived across Salesforce and an upstream fulfillment system. Multiple teams tried to claim ownership of requirements, each with a different understanding of how the data model worked. I facilitated alignment across GTM, Sales, Account Management, Engineering, and the Data Management team to establish a single source of truth for how commission data should flow.
The solution: a Salesforce commission intake form where sales and account managers log projected revenue per client at the start of the year. At year-end, the system automatically correlates those projections against actual orders in the fulfillment system. The output — a dashboard and executive report — surfaces who hit their targets, who didn’t, total commission paid, and revenue generated per dollar of commission spend.
Getting the integration right required close collaboration with the data management team to ensure historical data was accurately represented alongside new entries — not a small ask given how opaque the existing fulfillment system setup was.
The Outcome
- 500+ sales and account managers brought onto a structured commission process for the first time
- ~15% reduction in commission overpayments by tying payouts to verified revenue performance
- Executive dashboard giving leadership a hawk-eye view of commission ROI in real time
- Delivered on time through multiple rounds of requirements revision, with full UAT sign-off and org-wide training
What I Learned
The hardest problems in this project were organizational, not technical. When requirements ownership is contested and tribal knowledge is the only documentation, the PM’s job is to become the connective tissue — absorbing ambiguity from every direction and converting it into something an engineering team can build against.
Taking full lifecycle ownership, from discovery to post-launch metrics, meant no one could hand off a problem I hadn’t already anticipated. That level of accountability is uncomfortable at times, but it’s also what earns trust with stakeholders who’ve seen too many projects stall in handoff.