Build a Lump-Sum Rule
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain lump-sum rules.
- Build a lump-sum rule for your payout plan.
Before You Start
Before you start this Quick Look module, consider completing this recommended content.
Meet Lump-Sum Rules
Salesforce Spiff is a leading sales compensation software that automates and simplifies the process of calculating and managing sales commissions. In Spiff, a lump-sum rule is a payout rule that calculates a commission based on the criteria you decide. Lump-sum rules use a Spiff worksheet. Think of a worksheet as an open platform where you can create and store any formula that returns a single data point. Your final payout calculation for lump-sum rules comes from a single cell in a worksheet, sometimes summing a field from a data filter or list.
Unlike the other type of payout rule—a line-by-line rule—the calculation isn’t applied to each item in a set. Lump-sum rules only consider a single value.
In this Quick Look, find out how to build a lump-sum rule and do the calculations.
Before that, let’s consider a couple of sample commission plans based on lump-sum rules.
Imagine you set a lump-sum rule to pay out based on the total annual recurring revenue (ARR) from renewals. If a rep brings in more than $15,000 in a month, they get an extra $1,000 bonus. The lump-sum rule looks at the single ARR value from renewals.
Here’s a more complicated example: Each month, a rep’s commission is calculated by multiplying their monthly attainment by their $4,500 monthly target variable compensation. Assume that the rep has a monthly quota of $20,000. The rep closes $11,375 worth of deals for the period. $11,375/$20,000 results in 56.9% attainment for the rep that month. To calculate the rep's commission, the criteria you enter multiplies the attainment by the $4,500, and assesses the payout based on that field. This rep ends up taking home $2,560.50 for the month.
Most commission plans are more complex than these examples. However, understanding the concept helps you build your own rules.
Build a Lump-Sum Rule
In this Quick Look, we assume you’re a Salesforce Spiff administrator with the proper permissions to build payout rules. If you’re not an administrator for Spiff, that’s OK. Read along to learn how your admin would take the steps in a production org. Don’t try to follow these steps in your Trailhead Playground. Spiff isn’t available in the Trailhead Playground.
To build a lump-sum rule, you create a worksheet and then add the calculations. You use a data filter to apply the lump-sum rule calculation. For example, you can use a ClosedInPeriodRenewalByRep data filter to filter all records from your synced and uploaded object. This returns deals that have been closed-won by a specific rep, in a specific statement period, that have also been flagged as a renewal.
Let’s create the worksheet.
- Under the plan, click
.
- Select New Worksheet.
- Rename the worksheet to keep things organized. For example, you can name it
LumpSumTest_Worksheet.
Once you have the worksheet created, follow these steps to create the lump-sum calculations based on the renewal bonus example from earlier.
- Enter a column label for the ARR sum calculation, such as
Metrics. If you don't include an = sign before your text, whatever is typed will be directly entered into the cell.
- For the Metrics calculation, enter
=sum(ClosedInPeriodRenewals!ARR__c).In this example, the calculation returns a sum of the ARR for all qualifying deals in the period. How do you get this list? Directly with the ClosedInPeriodRenewal data filter!
- Rename the cell to
RenewalARRInPeriodfor easier reference.
- In the column next to Metrics, enter a column label for the commission calculation:
Commission.
- For the commission calculation, enter
=if(RenewalARRinPeriod>=15000,1000,0). Remember, you want to determine if the sum of a rep's ARR in a period is greater than $15,000. If it is, then the rule returns $1,000, otherwise, the rep gets no payout. Note that we use the if function here, which is widely used for lump-sum rules.
- Rename the cell to
RenewalsBonusCommission.
- Add the formula RenewalsBonusCommission to complete the lump-sum rule.
And that’s it! You’ve created a lump-sum rule for a renewals bonus commission plan. Good luck as you get started with lump-sum rules at your organization.