Create Salesforce Spiff Teams

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Access, download, edit, and upload the team upload template in Salesforce Spiff.
  
• Manually create and assign users to teams directly in Salesforce Spiff.
  
• Verify team and user assignments in Salesforce Spiff.
  

Introduction to Salesforce Spiff

Salesforce Spiff is a leading sales compensation software that automates and simplifies the process of calculating and managing sales commissions. Using Salesforce Spiff, organizations can ensure accurate, timely, and transparent commission payments, motivating sales teams and driving performance.

Having teams set up in Salesforce Spiff is crucial for several reasons. It allows you to organize your compensation management efficiently, ensuring that each team has tailored compensation plans that align with their specific goals and performance metrics. Proper team setup enables more accurate tracking and management of sales activities, fosters collaboration, and enhances communication within the team. Additionally, it ensures that commission calculations are precise and relevant, reflecting the unique structure and needs of each team.

Upload Teams with Template

Whether you’re in the initial phases of setting up your Salesforce Spiff instance or just need to accommodate changes in your org, you likely need to create a team. There are three ways to add teams to Salesforce Spiff.

1. Upload the teams using a template.
   
2. Create teams manually in the UI.
   
3. Use automation through Salesforce using User Role Hierarchies. Note that these hierarchies must be kept clean and up to date, otherwise it becomes difficult to manage—so this is likely not the best option.
   

When first setting up your teams within Salesforce Spiff, it can be time-consuming to manually create the teams one by one. This is especially true if you have a large amount of reps to assign or teams to create. Salesforce Spiff has the functionality to upload team structures and create them in bulk, saving you from all that clicking!

Access the Template

1. To find the template, navigate to the Teams page.
   
2. Click Add New Team.
   
3. Select Upload Multiple Teams from the dropdown.
   
4. Download and Edit the example file provided.
   

Edit the Template

In the example file, there are three tabs: teams, team_managers, and team_members. On each tab, only the red column headers are required fields. This means if you don’t have parent teams or you don’t need to set Effective As Of or Effective Until dates for the team managers and team members, you don’t have to use these fields. (More on effective dating in the next unit.)

On the teams tab, the parent_team_name field exists in cases where the team you’re creating is a subteam of another team. (More about subteams later.)

The team_managers (team leads) and team_members tab is where you add users to each team. Each user you assign to a team (through their user_id) needs to already exist in Salesforce Spiff.

If you’re not sure what Id to use for this column, go to Admin | Users, in the External Id column.

Tip: Export the user list (which includes these External Id’s) by clicking the Export button at the top right of the table. Then you can do an index and match or do vlookup to create the teams upload.

If it helps you keep track of the users being added, insert an additional column for something like the Rep’s Name. This won’t affect the upload, but it can be easier to manage compared to just going off of an Id in the user_id column.

Upload the File

After adding the necessary information to the file, click Browse your computer to select the appropriate file or drag and drop your .xlsx file on the bottom of the upload modal. You should see your teams with the correct users assigned on the Teams page.

Create Teams in Salesforce Spiff

You can choose to forgo uploading, and instead create a team directly in the UI.

1. Click Add New Team.
   
2. Again, select Add New Team from the dropdown.
   
3. Give the team a name.
   
4. Click Add Team Members or the plus (+) to select the appropriate users to add to the Team.
   
5. To Add team members, search or scroll through the list of users, and check the box next to each name you’d like to add.
   
6. Click Add Team Members to save the assignments.
   

Add Additional Users to Teams

Once a team is initially set up, there are a few ways to add additional users to a team—through user profile, via the Team pages, or by bulk.

To add team members via the User Profile:

1. Navigate to Admin | Users.
   
2. Click the user’s name highlighted in blue to bring up their profile.
   
3. Toggle Edit to make any changes to the Team Assignment Details.
   

To add team members via the Teams page:

1. Navigate to Teams.
   
2. Click the team name.
   
3. Click Add Team Members.
   
4. Follow the same process as above to add users.
   

Note: Only 50 users can be added to a team until the table gets another page and pagination arrows appear.

To bulk add users:

1. Navigate to Admin | Users.
   
2. In the left panel, select Team Assignments.
   
3. Use the upload functionality to add new team assignments, or update existing team assignments.
   

Note: This method is best suited for large-scale changes.

Remove Users from Teams

Removing users from teams is not recommended. Instead of removing a user from a team, enter an Effective Until Date for the user. (You learn more about effective dating in the next unit). If you do decide to remove a user from the team, realize this could affect commissions, rollups, team lead visibility, historical reporting, and so forth.

1. Navigate to the team member table.
   
2. Click the three dots at the row for the user being removed.
   
3. Click Remove.
   

Now you know how to set up teams in Salesforce Spiff using the upload template and in Salesforce Spiff directly. Next, learn how to manage your teams.

Resources

• Salesforce Spiff: Team and Team Assignment API Import (login credentials required)
• Salesforce Spiff: Bulk Uploading Users, Plan and Team Assignments, Currency Rates, and Quotas (login credentials required)