Pay Transparency and Your Sales Career

Since 7 June 2026, an EU deadline has redrawn the balance of power in salary negotiations. Most people talk about compliance. The real question is: what does it mean for your next salary conversation, whether you sit in Stockholm, Paris or London?

Jan Nordh breaks down the EU Pay Transparency Directive from a market perspective, practical, not legal. Why it shifts negotiating power toward the candidate, and how the picture differs across the Nordics, France and the UK. Sweden is pushing back and wants to renegotiate, France is moving toward salary ranges in adverts and a salary-history ban, and the UK sits outside the directive entirely after Brexit, with its own rules. At the center is the part rarely addressed concretely in sales: variable pay. Commission, bonus and OTE are explicitly covered by the rule, and the fixed and variable parts must be reported separately. The real lever is not the base, but where inequality actually sits in sales: territory, accounts, quota and ramp.

What you'll learn:

• The five core points of the directive, in plain terms, and what they mean in practice
• Where the Nordics, France and the UK really stand, and why Sweden is the outlier
• Why in sales the inequality sits in the variable part, not the base
• The right question in the room: is that base or on-target earnings?

For IT sales professionals, enterprise account executives and sales leaders in cybersecurity, enterprise software and AI across the Nordics, the UK, France and the wider EU. Snapshot June 2026.