You can lead a horse to water but can't make it drink. If you're actively notifying sales of deals slipping or in trouble and they don't take action, there's not much you can do. Thats why it's hard in an Ops position where you need to influence others but aren't their manager. If sales isn't using your data to inform their action, then you need to work with your boss/leadership to figure out how that can happen
some target SLAs around activity could help you create a report for deals that miss those targets. For example, if reps are supposed to be contacting their accounts once a week, and you have an account with an open opportunity without activity for 2-3 weeks, that should be flagged in a report (SFDC or otherwise). Bringing these things to sales attention earlier on can help them fix the problem.
Hey Zaid, one thing I'd note here is the tradeoff between how big the problem is and the controls you put in place to address it. From a Rev Ops perspective its makes sense to want to put in controls on your pipeline and stage progression by your reps. From a reps perspective though, any extra steps slow them down. Now obviously some controls are needed. But if reps feel there are too many roadblocks in place to progress deals, they'll start working outside the system. A good balance is required. Get their feedback when you're putting these controls in place.
Hi Risly, I'm in charge of Business Intelligence at my org, and have supported commissions for the last 3 years. Here's my take on each area:
Data Integrity - if there are data integrity issues in the commissions process, you likely have data integrity issues in several places you're trying to do reporting. Clean opportunity and/or bookings data, regardless of the comp plans, is vital to even starting to calculate comp.
Logic - This is where things can get tricky, especially if a rep doesn't understand how they're getting paid. Overrides, splits, and changes are going to happen but you need rules around who can authorize them and how they work for commissions purposes. Sales Management should be surprising you with new overrides or tier changes late in the process.
Black Box - the goal is that they understand their plan, and the numbers that make up their commissions so that questions are limited. Obviously things are going to come up. It really shouldn't matter which tool you're using. It should be obvious that based on the business they've closed (or whatever else they're measured on), they're getting paid a certain amount based on that. With all the deals that make that up and their commission calculations. If you have an expensive tool for this and your reps don't understand it, you're probably worse off than doing the calculations in Excel. At least in Excel you can show the detail making up the summary numbers.
Payout - similar to number 3. Finance needs to understand how the commissions/payout calculations work and can verify them completely. Also you need your Finance leaders to have signed off on the plans previously. You don't want them arguing the plans are wrong when your reps believe that's what they'll be getting paid based upon.
Curious how other RevOps teams calculate historical pipeline conversion in Salesforce? When you look back at a quarter, how do you calculate conversion across all pipeline that could have closed in that period? Pipeline that was open at the start of the quarter, created during the quarter, or pulled in or pushed out along the way. I’ve seen win rate and cohort-based conversion used a lot, but those don’t seem to capture what actually happened to the full set of Salesforce pipeline expected to close in a quarter. Do you rely on Salesforce reporting or snapshots for this, or do you handle it outside the platform?
