What’s Next in Media Sales Compensation for 2026?
As we head into 2026, the media industry faces a unique set of challenges in sales compensation. Media organizations must navigate aligning pay for performance and balancing increasingly integrated portfolio sales while developing compensation programs that can flex with emerging sales approaches— including hybrid artificial intelligence (AI) agent/human and self-service.
The media industry is undergoing significant changes, with sales organizations redefining what they’re selling. Leaders are encouraging sales reps to package multiple solutions for advertisers, drawing from a broader portfolio across digital and legacy formats. This approach, known as convergence selling, positions media companies as one-stop partners for advertisers, improving client retention and share of spend. There’s a significant focus on new digital formats like connected TV (CTV), programmatic, shoppable ads, and gaming, with media organizations building, acquiring, or partnering to offer these products to stay competitive.
The role of account managers and customer success managers is also evolving, with a shift towards more commercial responsibilities and a focus on strategic and revenue-oriented roles. Sales job archetypes and organizational structures are creating opportunities for companies that can adapt to these changes. Self-service models are also becoming more prevalent, with media selling shifting toward hybrid and full self-service for advertising clients, impacting cost to serve, campaign spend, and customer retention.
However, as sales organizations shift their models to be relevant in this evolving market, they face new compensation challenges. Ensuring that pay remains closely aligned with each seller’s true contribution is a key issue. Companies rely on individualized plans, blend team and individual metrics, or rely entirely on team measures, with a typical weighting of 70-80% on individual performance. Convergence selling and self-service require a new approach to motivating and rewarding sellers, with targeted incentives like uplifts, sales performance incentive funds (SPIFs), or credit adjustments being helpful.
The question of self-service compensation often boils down to the rep’s influence and involvement, with hybrid models and dedicated self-service roles warranting 15-25% of variable pay tied to self-service outcomes. Reps in strategic, agency-facing, or partnership roles often lack direct year-over-year revenue attribution, with success measured through KPIs like account penetration, bookings, milestones, or share within major accounts.
To address these challenges, sales compensation plans have become more complex, introducing additional measures, crediting challenges, or exceptions that can dilute seller focus. Best practice is to maintain two to three key measures and clearly prioritize plan weightings to align with strategic intentions.
To guide next steps, organizations can take the following five steps to redesign their sales compensation plans:
1. Use a balanced mix of individual and team metrics, typically favoring individual performance but including team-based factors for pod-selling models and shared responsibilities.
2. Prioritize clear incentives for strategic behaviors, considering uplifts and targeted credit adjustments for focus areas.
3. Define self-service compensation based on the rep’s true impact and consider adding specialized roles for automated channels.
4. For strategic, long-term-focused roles, incorporate milestone-based objectives and account penetration metrics rather than relying solely on annual revenue.
5. Limit measures and mechanics in compensation plans to two or three, ensuring weightings reflect priority of strategic initiatives, and rely on sound management to drive tactical focus.
By following these steps, media organizations can achieve greater effectiveness in their sales compensation plans, aligning incentives with strategic priorities, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and keeping plans simple and focused. World-class sales compensation programs can help solve business challenges, put a focus on what is important, and catalyze change and growth.