Xactly Enters On Demand Arena With Incent
A new company announced its launch on Tuesday, offering a sales compensation management application on demand.
Xactly will provide Xactly Incent on the software-as-service model to automate the process of setting and calculating sales commissions. The service is designed for medium-sized businesses with more than 100 employees.
In such organizations, this process is typically handled manually, using desktop spreadsheet applications, according to Xactly CEO Christopher Cabrera.
Xactly Incent can be used for managing compensation of direct sales teams and indirect channel partners, Cabrera said.
“We’ve targeted anybody who has any type of sales force where they pay dealer reps, agents or sales people, where there’s variable compensated that’s calculated,” Cabrera told internetnews.com. “That’s a pretty huge market.”
Xactly has identified around 50,000 companies in the U.S. alone with 50 or more people receiving variable compensation. “Literally 99.9 percent of those companies are using Excel today,” he said.
Cabrera added that while spreadsheets are okay for straightforward calculations, smaller businesses tend to simplify their commission structures to suit the limitations of that application.
Businesses could use Xactly Incent to increase profits by designing more complex commission structures to give better sales incentives for products the company wants to move. The sales manager could increase commissions on more profitable products, for example, as well as quickly adjust commissions to react to changing market conditions.
Because sales reps can log into personalized Web sites to monitor compensation, they can be made aware of changes in the commission structure as soon as they’re made. They can test what-if scenarios to decide where to expend their greatest efforts and see how much they’ve made to date with line-item detail.
“Reps today are all keeping track of their own orders, and when they get that statement at the end of the month, they spend all this time doing shadow accounting,” Cabrera said. “It’s a huge waste of productivity. In our world, all that goes away.”
The service can be integrated with Salesforce.com’s sales force automation applications.
“We’re a certified partner of Salesforce.com , and there’s great synergy between our two companies,” Cabrera said. “There’s a tremendous overlap among their customers and our early customers, but this fills a gap that’s been missing for them.”
Xactly will introduce Incent at Salesforce.com’s user conference held Sept. 12 through Sept. 14.