Problems like to multiply once a company grows past a handful of salespeople. A single deal might need an SDR who books the first meeting, an account executive who runs the discovery calls, a sales engineer who builds out the demo and a closer who hammers out the final terms.
Without a system for determining who gets the credit for what, every closed deal can become a bit of an internal argument. Even worse, managers wind up making hiring and comp decisions based on data that doesn’t match what actually happened – the CRM just shows whoever clicked the “Close Won” button as if they were responsible for the entire sale.
Let’s go over how to set up fair credit splits for your sales team!
The Benefits of Clear Sales Credit Rules
From a business standpoint, the benefits here are pretty obvious. Tracking attribution accurately will cause much better decisions about where to allocate your resources. The hiring decisions are way easier to justify if you have strong data to back them up. If your SDRs bring in around 30% of your total deal value, then you’ll have a much easier time securing the green light to add more headcount to the team. The numbers just back up what your leadership team probably already suspected anyway.
The coaching piece gets way better, too. Managers can finally see who’s actually pushing the deals through compared to the reps who are just there when the contract gets signed. That difference matters quite a bit for building your entire team and staying on top of everyone’s performance.
Revenue forecasts get quite a bit more accurate if you track the contributions. Your finance team would much rather work with actual data than make estimates based on hunches and gut instinct – this also opens up the ability to model different scenarios (like what would happen if you added two more account executives to the team, or how your pipeline might change if you cut support engineering capacity). These are questions you can answer with confidence if you have contribution data in place.
The human side of this matters as well. When teams have explicit attribution policies actually written down somewhere, their team satisfaction scores usually increase by 15% to 20% on average. Employees want to know that they’ll get fair credit for their work, and these policies give them that assurance.
Disputes are still going to pop up from time to time – even with the written policies in place. What changes is what everyone’s actually arguing about. Instead of fighting over who deserves the credit for a particular deal, the team ends up talking through how the policies apply to that situation – this type of disagreement is way easier to settle because everyone’s already working from the same starting point (it’s just about putting it correctly instead of each person pushing what they personally believe is fair).
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Draw the Line for What Counts
The first step is figuring out which activities should actually get credit. One person on the team needs to draw a sharp line between the work that moves a deal forward and the work that only barely touches it – this gets a bit tough fast because every team is going to have its own opinion about what qualifies as a contribution.
Define the minimum standards for what’s actually going to count as involvement in a deal. A baseline to work from would be something like 20 minutes of direct customer interaction or maybe attendance at two or more meetings that are related to that particular deal. Boundaries like this help separate out the sales reps who contributed to the closing of the deal from the ones who were just loosely connected to it along the way.
A few activities are easy to exclude right from the start. There’s not much value in forwarding an email or being CC’d on a thread. A quick Slack message to check on where a deal stands doesn’t count either. These take just a few seconds, and none of them are going to change the outcome for the customer in any actual way.
A technical expert who shows up at just the right time can save a deal that was about to fall through. The same goes for a person who can take care of contract negotiations or field a tough question during that final conversation. Maybe they’re only part of one or two calls out of the entire sales cycle. Their role can make or break the outcome when they do show up, though.
Edge cases are where most teams spend way too much time going in circles. Think about a sales engineer who joins late in the process but winds up running the entire product demo. Or maybe an account manager from another region makes the introduction but never speaks to the lead again after the handoff. These scenarios need some rules defined ahead because winging it deal by deal is a recipe for uncertainty and lost revenue.
You want to look at the work that took actual skill and a giant investment from the person who did it. Approaching recognition like that means your entire team will know what behavior gets rewarded and what you’re looking for from them going forward.
Pick the Best Attribution Model
A split commission works for lots of teams. But when you make that choice, it’s just the start. The harder part is how you divide up the credit between the team members who contributed to the sale. An attribution model has to line up with how the sales team actually works together to close deals.
The easiest way is to use a 50/50 split – this works best when two team members contribute equally to a deal. Smaller teams and startups use this structure all of the time, and you’ll see it when an account executive and a sales development rep collaborate from first contact right through to the close. Everyone on your entire team will get how it works without a long explanation, and it’s easy to track from month to month.
Role-based percentages work well when the team members do different amounts of work on each sale. A common starting point is a 70/30 split – 70% of the credit goes to the account executive who closes the deal, and 30% goes to the sales development rep who found and qualified the lead. The exact numbers depend on how your sales process actually works. Bigger deals with longer sales cycles usually call for a 60/40 split because the two roles stay involved for months. Other teams go with 80/20 instead if the account executive does most of the heavy lifting after the first handoff.
Milestone-based models let you divide the commission based on where each person jumps into the sales process. An SDR brings in the lead and qualifies it, earning around 30% at that qualification stage. An account executive runs the demo and negotiates the terms of the contract to take home another 50%. A customer success manager wraps everything up and collects the last 20% and each person on the team gets paid for the value they add to the deal at whatever point they actually contribute.
Your entire team structure is going to be your best guide for figuring out which commission model fits your business. Smaller teams usually work best with a basic 50/50 split because when team members manage multiple roles, easy math just makes everything run smoother. Bigger teams with more structure can usually benefit more from role-based percentages since each person has more defined responsibilities and there’s less overlap between what everyone does. Milestone-based models are a great fit for a longer sales cycle if you have obvious handoff points where one team member passes the deal along to the next person in line.
When Should Sales Credit Expire
Team sales can get messy from an attribution standpoint because you’ll have multiple team members who work on the same deal over time. These deals don’t happen overnight either – we’re talking about months or sometimes even years of work before anything closes. Eventually, somebody has to choose how long those early contributions should count when they’re dividing up the credit for the final sale.
Most teams work with this by putting in place expiration windows that change depending on the role. An SDR who brings in a lead might get credit for 6 to 12 months after the last time they actually talk to that person. Once that time is up, they don’t get credit for the deal anymore – even if they were the one who started the whole conversation. Sales engineers and account managers get the same treatment – if they work on a deal and then move to something else, the clock eventually runs out on their credit, too.
These windows are in place because deals change hands quite a bit, and the circumstances around them can change over time. A prospect who went dark for 18 months and then suddenly came back is a brand new opportunity by that point. The rep who closes that deal is the one who did most of the heavy lifting to revive it and get it across the finish line – it wouldn’t be fair to give full credit to a person who made a single phone call 2 years earlier – it just doesn’t match up with the effort that went into securing a signed contract.
The right balance can be tough with these kinds of structures. Teams need to give recognition to the ones who originally got the deal moving. But at the same time, older contributions can’t be allowed to overshadow the work that’s happening now. A gradual decrease seems to work well for most teams as an alternative to a hard cutoff. Credit starts at 100% for that original contributor, and from there it drops by a set percentage each month once they’ve moved on from that account.
A sales engineer who hasn’t touched a deal in about 90 days might still get around 50% of their original credit. At the 6-month mark, that number usually drops down to something like 25%. The idea here is to give credit for the work they put in early on and to make some room for the team members who are actually pushing that deal through now.
Your time windows should match up with your sales cycle, or they won’t be helpful. Large deals take a long time to close, so a 12-month expiration window is usually the right fit for those types of transactions. Transactional sales are a different story – they move way faster. That means you should set shorter windows in the 30 to 60-day range. Whatever expiration timeframes you go with, they need to match how your entire team closes the business.
Level Up Your Incentives and Rewards
Perfect split credit laws don’t show up in the world, and fortunately, that doesn’t have to be a problem for your entire team. The best strategy is to build a system that everyone can trust – something that feels fair and makes logical sense to the team members who have to live with it every day. Your sales reps can see how credit gets divided between them, and when they believe the process treats everyone fairly, you’ve already solved the hardest part of this challenge. Your job is not to engineer some perfect mathematical formula that somehow accounts for every unusual scenario that might pop up. All that extra difficulty only creates uncertainty and frustration that nobody wants to work with.
Build an easy system first – one that covers the main splits between your primary contributors. Add in more layers later. But only if you do run into a big problem that needs to be fixed. Most leaders want to plan for every edge case right from the start. But the teams that get it right don’t do it that way. The best split credit systems evolve alongside your entire team, and you should update it every quarter based on what’s actually happening in your deals – not what leadership thinks should happen or what worked at someone’s old company. Your reps will tell you where the gaps are through their questions and complaints, and that’s the right time to make changes.
A basic framework is still way better than no structure at all, and it gives everyone something concrete to reference when questions come up. The documentation itself is what matters in the beginning, and refinements can always happen later as the team gets more comfortable with the process. Sales reps want easy laws to follow, even when the system is still in progress and could probably use some adjustments down the line.
Incentives work a whole lot better when you actually have the right systems in place to support them. Split credit laws are a perfect example of this – they help to make sure everyone gets credit where credit’s due. Level 6 takes incentive programs to the next level with tools like branded debit cards, employee rewards and recognition programs and custom sales incentives that move the needle for your whole team. We partner with teams that want to grow and win, and we build programs around their goals and what matters to their business.
Want to see what better ROI and stronger sales numbers look like for your company? Contact us for a free demo!
Claudine is the Chief Relationship Officer at Level 6. She holds a master’s degree in industrial/organizational psychology. Her experience includes working as a certified conflict mediator for the United States Postal Service, a human performance analyst for Accenture, an Academic Dean, and a College Director. She is currently an adjunct Professor of Psychology at Southern New Hampshire University. With over 20 years of experience, she joined Level 6 to guide clients seeking effective ways to change behavior and, ultimately, their bottom line.
