How should sponsors model promote sensitivity?

Promote sensitivity shows whether incentives remain understandable across realistic performance outcomes. For sponsors, LPs, investors, and advisors evaluating sponsor compensation and alignment, the practical answer is to treat the question as part of fee design, carry and promote modeling, co-investment, reserves, governance, distribution timing, and incentive alignment, not as a one-off definition. The record should show the economics memo, governing documents, waterfall model, fee schedule, co-invest records, distribution examples, and investor disclosures so an investor, lender, counsel, administrator, or operating lead can reconstruct the decision later. Run cases that isolate the effect of preferred return, catch-up, residual split, hold period, debt paydown, and interim distributions. The common failure mode is showing only a base-case return where sponsor economics look aligned while downside and timing scenarios tell a different story.