For mid-size to larger companies with a matrix or overlay sales structure, accurately calculating and distributing commissions from opportunity splits can be a nightmare, to say the least. If you’re one of those people responsible for figuring out the breakdown of these distributions, you understand the dilemma better than most.

When you have a team approach to sales, credits must sometimes be disbursed among many participants, not just the sellers who closed the sale.

Maintaining accuracy is key with these splits, and accounting systems often require rigorous testing and auditing capabilities to handle them. In particular, you need to be able to explain to sales people at any time the rationale behind how their commission payment was calculated.

Opportunity Splits Can Be Complicated

These splits can take many forms and quickly become quite complicated. A few examples:

 

• If the deal is closed by a subsidiary of a large multinational company, all participating local representatives plus the global account manager may be eligible for a piece of the deal.
• If a particular deal goes through a long sales funnel involving multiple sales reps, the reps participating early in the process may be eligible for credits for a period of time even after leaving the company.
• A particular deal may exist within overlapping territories, making sales reps from two or more territories eligible for commission.
• If a channel partner was involved with the sale, the alliance manager may be eligible for credits along with the team who closed the deal.
• Depending on your company’s compensation structure, a number of product managers may also be eligible for compensation from the revenue generated by products in their portfolio—so these people, too, get a piece of the pie.

The above scenarios barely scratch the surface of what is possible with opportunity split assignments. In many cases, all of these scenarios may apply—plus you may have to figure out compensation for a long line of sales managers, customer success managers and sales engineers, all of whom have a stake in the sale. For larger companies, it’s not uncommon to assign full or partial commissions in as many as 100 different directions.

As you can imagine, figuring these commissions out manually can be a painstaking ordeal requiring hours of work. And if you’re a manager or executive, you know it only takes one error in one of these transactions before you see your inbox filled with complaints from your team—or worse, a long line forming outside your office with employees wondering why their commission check is lower than they expect. (Make no mistake—these professionals know how much money they’re owed.) Consistent payment errors or delayed commissions can deeply impact morale throughout the company, eventually affecting the sales numbers themselves.

Salesforce has partially addressed Opportunity Splits by allowing companies to record the attribution of credit to multiple team members for a single deal. However, it offers no solution for calculating the actual splits. When you consider how many factors may go into a split, including overlap, team structure changes, alliance partners and territory assignments, it can feel like Salesforce has provided an oven and a list of ingredients, but figuring out the recipe to bake the cake is somehow up to you.

Enter Decisions on Demand

Decisions on Demand is a Salesforce AppExchange partner with a specifically designed solution to manage all aspects of complex assignments, including the accurate calculation of opportunity splits.

Using a framework based on rule-based decisioning, Decisions on Demand can not only automate the lead and opportunity assignment process, but also assign commission splits to the penny based on rules associated with a deal, saving you hours of time and innumerable stress headaches. We’ve dug deeper than our competitors into the intricacies of complex assignments, providing a rich set of built-in capabilities as well as unparalleled configuration and extension options —so no matter how complicated your opportunity splits, our app can handle it.

Contact us today to learn more about how Decisions on Demand can facilitate your sales lead and opportunity split assignment processes. We’re happy to schedule a personalized demo at your convenience.