The selling process can be compared to a team sport, especially when it comes to large deals that involve multiple products, demos, conversations, and negotiations. This means that during a deal cycle, several team members from various teams may conduct activities related to the particular customer to ensure the deal is won. These team members may receive commissions based on the opportunity’s amount and, of course, their involvement.
In this article, we will zoom into the Opportunity Split functionality, exploring how it can be used to split the revenue, how to enable it, and how customizations can help tailor the implementation to your organization.
What Are Opportunity Splits?
Opportunity splits in Salesforce are an out-of-the-box functionality that can be enabled by companies wishing to track how revenue has to be shared among colleagues working together in different roles on one single opportunity in Salesforce.
These records represent how revenue from the opportunity is to be split based on an associated percentage for each user added to this section. Once this data exists, the splits can be further analyzed in reports and dashboards and also used for forecasting exercises.
Through the use of this functionality, individual contributions can be recognized in a transparent manner across all opportunities, providing key insights that can further be used for future decision-making when it comes to the sales process.
Set Up Opportunity Splits
As mentioned above, opportunity splits are available for organizations to make use of – however, they do have to be set up first. Let’s go through the steps that you, as a Salesforce Administrator, will have to complete to expose this functionality to your users.
1. Team Selling
If you have already opened a developer edition and searched for Opportunity Splits in Setup, you might have noticed that there’s nothing coming up. This is because prior to enabling opportunity splits, the first step is to enable team selling, meaning Opportunity Teams. When having multiple colleagues collaborating on a deal, each user should be added to the Opportunity Team with their respective role and level of access.
If your organization is already using Opportunity Teams, you can move on to the next step.
2. Review Prerequisites
Prior to enabling opportunity splits, it’s important to know how this new functionality will impact existing data and also how to ensure that the process will be successful. You should:
- Consider enabling the feature outside business hours. Depending on the volume of opportunities, the process may take several hours as an Opportunity Split record for the Opportunity Owner will be created for each opportunity.
- Make sure that there are no mass operations in progress, such as account or opportunity ownership transfers and mass reassignments of Opportunity Team members. During the enablement of opportunity splits, validation rules, Apex triggers, and workflows will be temporarily disabled.
- Check that there are no opportunity records that have an inactive currency as the opportunity split will fail if these exist. Salesforce recommends potentially temporarily activating the currency while splits are set up to not lose historical data.
- Transfer ownership of any opportunities owned by automated process users.
3. Create Split Types and Enable Opportunity Splits
Now that team selling is enabled and you have checked the prerequisites, it’s time to actually enable opportunity splits.
By default, Revenue and Overlay are two available split types – one totaling 100%, and the other not. You can create an additional six custom split types, and the Split field can be based on most standard or custom fields, as long as the type is currency. The split type will become available while reporting on the opportunity split records, hence you will be able to seamlessly report on which users are part of each category.
When ready, click “Save” towards the bottom of the page. And guess what? You will be reminded once again about checking the prerequisites, which may interfere with the success of the opportunity split process.
4. Opportunity Products – To Split or Not To Split?
Opportunity splits is a functionality that has been around for a long time. Although you may not have used it, you might have heard about it. More recently, product splits were also introduced to account for a more granular level of revenue split at Opportunity Product level, hence offering the ability for teams to be even more specific about their involvement within the opportunity.
Product splits can be enabled for each split type individually if you decide to make use of this. If not, you can simply have the box unchecked.
However, if your organization wants to explore this part of the functionality, below is an example of a report for you to see just how much more detail you can obtain.
Having this insight available can be especially useful for product marketing teams. For example, they can correlate their efforts with the specific product they contributed to. Additionally, your team can also note if, for instance, additional professional services were needed for only one product in particular.
5. Add the Related Lists to Page Layouts and Record Pages
In case you haven’t already selected the page layouts to add the opportunity teams and opportunity split related lists during their respective setup, it’s time to do so now. For the layouts, both of these are just related lists that you can reorder as necessary.
However, on the Opportunity Record page, you could either add a single Related List component wherever you believe would work best for your users to access, or even better – make use of the relatively new standard Opportunity Splits component, for example, in a new dedicated tab. If you go for this option, you will also be able to condition individual tab visibility once the Summer ‘24 release hits production orgs.
From this component, users will be able to add either opportunity or even product splits if they are enabled. On top of that, you can easily review the monetary amount for each category and user.
6. Happy Splitting!
With the functionality enabled, types created, and layouts/record pages updated, your team can now make use of opportunity splits to easily track the revenue share on individual Salesforce records!
Customize the Experience
Opportunity Split is a standard Salesforce object which you can adjust as needed for your users to get the most out of using it. You can create custom fields, adjust the layout, or enforce validation rules. Additionally, considering the importance that the split percentage will have on the compensation aspect, it may be a good idea to enable history tracking on it sooner rather than later.
Of course, you can also automate the opportunity or product split creation based on certain criteria so that the users won’t always have to add them manually – be it through Salesforce Flows or Apex. Keep in mind that regardless of the choice of tool or overall process, hardcoding user Ids or names is never a good idea, as instead, you should retrieve the information based on other attributes such as role.
Considerations
As it happens with all features, be they out-of-the-box or not, there are a few considerations to keep in mind. Opportunity splits and product splits are no different, and you should note the below:
- You can have up to eight total split types, including six custom ones.
- If you enable opportunity splits but decide they are not ultimately right for your organization, you can go back to the Setup page and disable them, as long as you don’t need the historical data.
- The Opportunity Owner or users above them in the Role hierarchy can add or edit opportunity and product splits.
- Opportunity splits can be created based on any standard or custom currency field as long as it’s not a formula field.
Depending on your requirements and process, there might be other guidelines to consider, so make sure to check the extended list before enabling this functionality.
Summary
All in all, splitting opportunity revenue in Salesforce can easily be achieved with this out-of-the-box functionality, which can be customized (to an extent) depending on your organization’s needs.
Be it through opportunity splits alone or alongside product splits, you can enhance Salesforce and offer your users further transparency into how percentages are attributed, as well as each colleague’s involvement in any given opportunity.