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HubSpot Sales: How to calculate profitability-based commissions in HubSpot

If you want to measure not only the turnover of team members but also their profitability, and then use that data to calculate commissions, here is a step-by-step guide to do so in HubSpot!

Step 1: Calculate and capture profitability (Margin)

To do this out-of-the-box, sales users can add line items to deals they own, either custom line items or those saved to the portal in the product library - ensuring that, whichever method is used, both the Price and Unit cost properties are populated so the Margin is auto-calculated by HubSpot.

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Step 2: Stamp profitability (Margin) up to the Deal

The next step will be to create a custom calculated deal property to pull the calculated line item level Margin up to the Deal record. 

The benefit of having the Margin at a deal level is that you can then create a custom calculation deal property formatted as a currency to calculate the commission payment for that deal based on the profitability of it, calculation properties are not available at a line item level. 

E.g. If the commission on deals with a margin of less than £10,000 is 10% and over £10,000 is 20% the calculation property would be something like:

IF(([DEAL.margin] < 10000), ([DEAL.margin] * 0.1), ([DEAL.margin] * 0.2))

You'll be able to test your formula within the property builder to ensure the formula is calculating as expected.

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Step 3: Report on profitability (Margin) 

As this is a deal property, you can then build a report showing total commission by rep by close month, something like this:

Screenshot 2024-06-05 at 16.25.17

You can adapt this process to meet your business needs, adding in things such as:

  • a profitability percentage calculation property 
  • a commission payment status 
  • a commission leaderboard 

Hannah Fisher portrait

Author: Hannah Fisher

HubSpot CRM Platform Consultant