Author: Tim Bensman
Processing sales commissions and getting payroll out the door can be a difficult task each month. This is especially true if you are not using any software to help! Inserting Xactly into your sales commission process helps improve your existing process but also creates unexpected value! Let's compare the difference between life before and after implementing Xactly.
Sending out pay statements vs. On-demand statements
To start, let’s talk about the end of the process. Checks have gone out the door - but how does a sales rep know how they are getting paid? What insight do they have other than the number in their commission check? I’ve spoken to quite a few sales reps and I ask them about their commission checks. Do they understand how it was calculated? They shrug their shoulders and say, “I just trust the amount in the paycheck!" That is terrible! If sales commission checks are supposed to be motivating sales reps and they have no idea how anything is calculated, that is a significant problem.
Compensation plan designers spend hours and hours pouring over details to ensure accelerator rates make sense. If an employee doesn’t know when an accelerator kicks in, then the sales compensation plan is not doing its job.
The benefit of Xactly is that it adds a display layer to the data. It provides a graphical interface where a sales rep should be able to quickly see how much and why they are getting paid a certain way. This includes ‘at a glance’ dashboards but also in-depth drill-down Incentive Statement reports.
Laborious report generation vs. Instantly available reports
Do you have sales analysis reports you put together on a monthly basis? If your job was anything like mine when I was an admin, you might have quite a few. These reports typically take a very long time to put together and then needed someone to review them before they got delivered.
Here's a short story from when I was an admin (Before we got Xactly):
Ranking reports were something that our team produced monthly. It would take probably a week to put these together due to last-minute adjustments, pulling from different sources of data, checking the results against their monthly statements, etc. We would send out these reports and then the sales VPs would have a problem with it. Someone was too low or someone was too high or something looked off. Our team was dejected and embarrassed. Here’s something we worked on for a while, and there were still problems with it! We had to correct the error and send it out. By the time we did, the data was already stale!
People lose faith in the data if they know it’s been wrong in the past
Xactly changed all of that. Because the Ranking report was now automated and updated every day, everyone had constant, on-demand access. No more week-long effort to produce the report and no more static data!
Fragmented data vs. One source of truth
Another issue I would frequently run into is the idea of a single source of truth of data. VP's would often ask how well a certain group is performing against their goal. And before Xactly, they would ask one analyst and get one number… and then they would ask another analyst the same question and get a different answer! Were revenue adjustments being included? What about quota adjustments? Are we talking GAAP revenue or non-GAAP revenue? Obviously, this would lead to a lot of frustration. Xactly changed all of that.
We would now have one source of truth and everyone agreed on the numbers. It put a lot of arguments to bed. Having a central repository for all of sales data was immensely helpful.
Emailing Plan Documents vs. Sending Plan Docs through Xactly with Approval Tracking
Another area in which we have seen clients have had a big change in process is the idea of sending Plan Documents through Xactly. Typically HR owns this process in most organizations, but there is a ton of value in using Xactly for this purpose.
Plan Document templates in Xactly pull directly from the People and Plan information already stored in Xactly. It’s incredibly easy to pull together a template and you can copy and reuse the same template from year to year, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
Additionally, there is a built in tracking feature that makes it very easy to see who has approved their plan. By storing all of this in Xactly, you can avoid having to use email and manage the approval process that way.
And this is just the start! Want to learn more about how life changes after you get Xactly? Just click the button below, or go to https://canidium.com/contact/. One of our experts, from our dedicated Xactly practice, will reach out and be more than happy to have a conversation. Want to speak with me directly? Just request to in your note! 
Written by Tim Bensman, Canidium's Xactly Practice Lead