How to build Tiers and Accelerators in CloudComp for Salesforce

When designed properly, sales accelerators encourage sellers to hit and exceed their goals, and they help boost payouts for high performers while limiting pay for low performers. 

The results of well-designed Tiers and Accelerators are individual pay outcomes and overall sales compensation expenses that are competitive with the market.

Without accelerators in place, goals or quotas can have far less financial impact on sales reps than intended, meaning your company runs the risk of underpaying high performers and overpaying low performers. 

Tiers and Accelerators are are quick and easy to build and manage in CloudComp Commission Anything! And best of all, if you know how to use CloudComp, you can do it yourself on your own time, right in your own Salesforce Org!

In CloudComp Compensation Plans, each row is called a "Compensation Plan Tier". The Plan Tiers take a number of arguments including "Attainment Base" and "Attainment Top" which enable setting percentages of Quota Target to define Attainment-based Tiers or Accelerators, "Quota Type" which enables associating the CloudComp Quota records that will deliver the Attainment Percentages and "Revenue Type" which controls the records that can qualify for the Plan Tier.

The Compensation Plan below is a "Team-based" Plan using monthly targets, meaning that a manager who is assigned to the compensation plan will receive her base and accelerator commissions according to the production of her sales team against her Quota Target during each month. Any Plan Tier in CloudComp can be Individual or Team-based according to the Quota Type declared for the Tier. So you can easily mix and match Individual and Team-based Tiers and Accelerators on the same CloudComp Compensation Plan.

When CloudComp generates commissions for our manager Stacy, it uses the Attainment Percentage from her Quota (of the Quota Type declared for the Plan Tier) to process the Attainment-based Tiers. This enables any number of Sales Reps to be assigned to the same Compensation Plan with different sales targets for the same fiscal period (month quarter or year). This also enables you to set different targets by fiscal period for the same user, thereby supporting ramping, seasonal differences in sales volume, etc.

Because each Plan Tier is processed individually by CloudComp, only the sales that meet the exact criteria for each Tier are qualified for commissions. Note in the screenshot below, that though Stacy Owen's Team exceeded 100% of her Quota Target for the month of October, thereby activating the Accelerators for the App Subscriptions and Support products, the Training product sales did not qualify for the >100% Attainment Accelerator. 

Why did the training product sales not qualify for the >100% Attainment Accelerator? It is because the Accelerator Tiers on this Compensation Plan are activated via date-time sequence. Though the overall Team-based Quota Attainment exceeded 100% of target during the month, the Training product sales occurred prior to the date-time of 100% achievement of Target. A Period-based calculation method is also supported as an alternative to date-time sequence and Plan Tiers can be set to be Retroactive as well so that they pay out commissions on existing records when the Attainment Base of the Plan Tier is achieved.

Please feel free to Contact Surfwriter today if you have questions about how CloudComp Commission Anything can automate your Tiers and Accelerators or you would like to see a demo of CloudComp in action. 

Good luck with your commissions automation project!