How HPE Transformed Its Sales Comp Strategies to Grow and Innovate

Sales compensation is more than a rewards program — it’s a strategic lever used to solve business challenges and a catalyst for change and growth. That is according to Rachel Parrinello, a principal and the sales compensation solutions lead at the Alexander Group, a U.S.-based consulting firm.

To illustrate her point, Parrinello (at left in the above photo) invited Trent Akagi (at right), the vice president of sales compensation and readiness at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), to the stage at WorldatWork’s Sales Comp ’25 conference in Chicago. He shared with the audience recent corporate transformations where sales comp was a major focus.

HPE, which spun off from Hewlett-Packard in 2015, is a global technology company providing IT infrastructure, software and services. Akagi currently works with approximately 8,000 sellers.

Access an additional article from WorldatWork’s Sales Comp ’25 conference:

• Pursuing a Career in Sales Compensation? Here Are 5 Suggestions
• Considering Contexts: Creating Habits Beyond Sales Compensation

Focusing on Strategic Recurring Revenue

Over the past eight years, Akagi worked with the HPE leadership team to implement changes to the company's sales compensation model to reflect its product line evolutions. He explained that because the company has a mix of products, it considered different measures and weights in salesperson plan. Some of those measures and weights options included:

• Sales performance incentive funds (SPIF) like a short-term bonus or credit uplift
• Add-on bonuses or a rate uplift
• Credit adjustments (an uplift or downlift)
• A measure with a product hurdle (can be a higher accelerator if the product goal was achieved)
• A separate product measure 

For example, when HPE introduced a recurring revenue hybrid cloud solution and service called GreenLake, the product accounted for only about 1% of the company’s business, and salespeople (who had to figure out how to sell the product) earned only a bonus for selling GreenLake, Akagi said. As the GreenLake business grew, he said the design of the sales compensation program shifted to include, along with the bonus, credit uplifts and up to a 30% expanded focus measure. The incentives were offered to GreenLake specialists, core sellers and/or all specialists.

Now, he said, approximately 80% of the company is measured with a focus on GreenLake as a service, and the line accounts for approximately 10% of the business because people know how to sell it.

Driving Sales Culture

Another challenge HPE faced involved determining the appropriate crediting event options that is the basis for quota and payout. Options included bookings (e.g., closed contracts and orders) and revenues (e.g., shipments, invoices/billings or deployment).

HPE’s crediting challenge intensified in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic caused supply chain issues. At the time, the sellers who were measured on bookings for services and shipment for hardware, were spending too much time trying to get orders shipped.  According to Parrinello, HPE had wanted to move to bookings for everything for awhile and leveraged the supply constraint issues as the catalyst to make the move.  It resulted in sellers focusing more on bookings (not shipment) and better aligned to recurring revenue and software market practices. 

Rewarding Megadeals

In January 2025, HPE announced it had struck a deal worth more than $1 billion to provide social media platform X with servers optimized for artificial intelligence (AI) work.

Akagi said the “megadeal” program was introduced right after they launched GreenLake, but those were initially around $10 million to $20 million. Now with much larger AI deals, HPE had to develop new incentive payouts for such agreements. That included creating a meaningful and predictable program with seller focus, providing appropriate payouts and not disrupting overlay crediting.

The problem with megadeals is they are unpredictable and include a longer sales cycle, Parrinello said. In addition, she noted sellers who are overpaid generally tend to believe they are worth that amount, and if they don’t make that figure again, they may become a “flight risk” and leave the company.

Akagi noted not all of the salespeople assigned to the X account were responsible for the megadeal. “If you just let the credit flow through, you would have a big issue,” he said. And added, “We had to make sure the payouts were meaningful.”

Now, HPE generally defines megadeals as starting at $50 million, with some variation applied to different geographic regions. In addition, megadeals must be registered four weeks in advance so leadership can communicate who will or will not be getting paid.

The new incentive payout program determines sellers payout based on megadeal size/profitability and the seller's contribution levels:

• Opportunity lead (one to two sellers)
• High key contributor (one to five sellers)
• Key contributor (one to five sellers)

Lessons Learned

Looking back at all the changes, Akagi said his main takeaways were to pursue strategic clarity and simplicity, know that adjustments will take time, and most of all, communicate. “We’re seeing a difference in how the salespeople are behaving, but if you really want to drive change, you have to have everybody rolling in the same direction,” he said.

Editor’s Note: Additional Content

For more information and resources related to this article, see the pages below, which offer quick access to all WorldatWork content on these topics:

• Finance and Budgeting
• Organizational Performance
• Sales Compensation