Opportunity Product Splits: How It Enables Fair Revenue Split for Opportunities with Multiple Products

There are no silver bullets in sales but ‘Team Selling’ has come closest to it. Most organizations now use team selling to accelerate deal cycles and create better customer expectations. So when there is a team involved, it is practical to recognize the individual contributions to every won opportunity.

To split a fair credit/share among the involved team members of a closed-won opportunity, Salesforce provides a standard functionality in Sales Cloud – Opportunity Splits.

And here begins the story of Isaac Jay

Isaac is the sales manager of a Denver-based MNC – a global provider of financial software solutions. The company has stringently implemented team selling model within their organization. There are multiple stakeholders for every opportunity including marketers, sales reps, business analysts, etc.

So for every closed-won opportunity, opportunity owners split the revenue share among those involved based on their contribution. But there were many opportunities that have multiple Opportunity Products, and the role and contribution of every team member varied for every sale. So, it was not a fair split based on the standard calculation.

Grazitti was the Salesforce consulting partner for Isaac’s company. So, they approached our team seeking a solution for redressing this issue.

The Backstory to the Solution

Our Salesforce experts did an analysis of their Salesforce Org to devise a solution plan. Based on our preliminary analysis, we proffered Isaac to customize the standard functionality (Opportunity Splits) to enable a fair split of revenue share to team members for multiple product selling whilst preserving the standard Opportunity Splits.

We proposed to build a similar custom component to give shares to sales reps or team members on the basis of each product amount and then storing the average of all product amounts in the standard opportunity splits.

Key terminologies that you should know:

• Revenue Split

Revenue splitting is sharing the revenue between an opportunity’s team members and to credit the team members who are directly involved.

• Overlay Split

Overlay splitting allows managers to give credit to supporting team members. Overlay split comes into the picture when a sales manager wants to give credit to members who are not directly responsible for the opportunity but somehow helped close the deal.

Then ‘Opportunity Product Splits’ Came to Existence

Our Salesforce experts developed Opportunity Product Splits, a custom component that equipped managers with an option that allows modifying the percentage for a split for every product depending upon the role of the user. Admin users can define the default percentage using custom metadata and also product splits can be updated on the Opportunity level depending upon the access level.

When a team member is added to an opportunity, the role of the team member is looked against the custom metadata. If custom metadata of that user already exists, the same percentage as of metadata is entered automatically else left blank and the owner can define it using the product splits component under the revenue section.

How the Opportunity Product Splits work

Since the revenue percentage can’t exceed 100%, we built a custom mechanism. It works in a way that if the opportunity owner has 100% share and a team member with the role Account Manager has 50% share, the splits will be done in a manner that the Account Manager will have 50% and the remaining (100% of Account Manager) will be the
opportunity owner’s share.

Also, as revenue split percentage can’t be greater than 100%, the percentage of the owner is adjusted if and when a team member is added to an opportunity. If the percentage of the owner is zero, no further adjustments to the owner’s percentage can be made. The user will not be allowed to add an opportunity team member if the team member (to be added) has a defined percentage.

When a new product is added to the same opportunity and the percentage split for that product will be defined based on the team members percentage defined in metadata.

The average share of each opportunity team member will be entered into the Opportunity Splits records. The average of each user is calculated on the basis of the formula:

Average Percentage = Total Share in Each Product/Total Amount (Opportunity) × 100

Addition of Overlay Percentage

The manager can add up the team members which were indirectly associated with the opportunity and can provide them the share using overlay splits.

For example, there is a user named ‘Samantha’ who was not directly associated with opportunity but the manager wants to give her the credit for her help in closing the deal. So the same can be achieved using overlay split of opportunity product splits.

Bottom Line

Isaac’s problem was finally addressed and a fair share of revenue split motivated the team members in Isaac’s company to perform better and their sales numbers saw an upward rally. You can be next.

Liked Product Opportunity Splits? Contact us to get it for your Salesforce Org.