Many retailers rely on a manufacturer to fully manage his brand’s space in the store. This could include managing the sales force by designing and paying for their compensation plan. Why would a retailer delegate the compensation of its own in-store sales force, thereby losing control over them and their induced effort to a self-interested manufacturer? This paper suggests sales force compensation plans as a coordination tool in the channel. Sales response to salesperson effort depends on many factors. Some of these are related to the selling environment but others are related to the characteristics of the sold product. When the manufacturer has better information on these characteristics than the retailer because of his superior knowledge of his brand, he has less uncertainty about the sales effort response function and marginal sales productivity in particular. Hence, the manufacturer may actually be more efficient than the retailer in inducing optimal sales effort. This efficiency is shown to result in a lower per-unit cost of salesperson effort (commission) for the channel, which reduces the selling price given the same effort level. However, by delegating sales force compensation to the manufacturer, the retailer does lose part of her control over the sales to the manufacturer and thus risks suffering from manufacturer opportunism. We solve this tradeoff that the retailer faces and we investigate under what conditions the whole channel and the retailer are better off by delegating sales force compensation to the manufacturer.