The higher the motivation of your sales team, the greater the revenue they produce. Yet, administering intricate incentive programs on a large scale often leads to errors and requires significant manual labor. Xactly Incentive Compensation Management Software (ICM) addresses this fundamental inefficiency.

At Canidium, our team of dedicated experts design, configure, and implement Xactly according to client specifications. We have partnered with Xactly for 12 years.

Based on our extensive experience, this guide covers everything you need to know about Xactly Implementations.

• The case for ICM software
• Xactly’s capabilities
• Who uses Xactly?
• Xactly success story
• Four factors impacting Xactly Incent and Connect implementation costs
• Xactly offerings 
• Xactly Implementation pricing
• Buyer’s guide download

The Case for Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) Software

ICM solutions like Xactly are crafted to effectively manage and optimize sales incentives, ensuring your team is adequately motivated and compensated. Xactly processes commissions and bonuses using real-time sales data, automating the calculation of variable pay to eliminate the errors common in traditional methods. This ensures that each salesperson receives accurate compensation without delay. 

ICM solutions also support the design and implementation of customized incentive plans tailored to your business needs. These plans can include bonuses for meeting sales targets, extra commissions for upselling, or rewards for sustaining customer satisfaction. 

At Canidium, our ICM team skillfully designs, configures, and implements Xactly according to client requirements. Leveraging the deep expertise of our specialists, this buyer’s guide covers everything you need to know about implementing Xactly.

Xactly’s Capabilities

Xactly can keep your sales team motivated, engaged, and focused on driving sales by providing precise and achievable incentives. Let's delve into the core capabilities of Xactly, and explore how it can transform your approach to compensation and incentive management.

• AI: The new AI Copilot allows you to interact with Xactly's platform using natural language queries, making accessing and analyzing data easier. For instance, as a sales manager, you can ask the system to "show me the people earning sales commissions" or "show me the top three deals for May." The tool will promptly provide the relevant information.
• Xactly Extend: Xactly allows you to design unique workflows requiring approvals or automate processes such as creating an order based on a dispute. This flexibility allows you to tailor the platform to meet specific operational requirements, making it possible to create virtually any custom solution needed.
• Variable Pay Management: Xactly allows you to set up complex compensation structures for unit prices, discount levels, and sales volumes.
• Incentive Plan Design: Xactly facilitates individually configured incentive plan design to target specific metrics. With Xactly, you can perform scenario modeling, adjust various plan components, and predict the potential outcomes. For instance, you can model changes to commission structures, bonus tiers, or other incentives to see how these adjustments might impact seller performance and overall business goals.
• Compensation Management: Xactly automates time-consuming and error-prone compensation management processes. It also increases compensation plan transparency, making it easier to adjust structures according to changing priorities or market factors.
• Forecasting: With Xactly Forecasting, businesses can leverage advanced analytics and data-driven insights to make informed decisions. Canidium's implementation expertise ensures a tailored setup that aligns with the unique forecasting needs of each client.

Who Uses Xactly?

Xactly is used by companies to design, implement, and manage compensation plans that align sales behaviors with business goals. Here are four key types of users within a company who typically interact with Xactly and the challenges the solution addresses for each role:

Compensation Administrators

Administrators are responsible for managing complex compensation plans, ensuring they are updated, accurate, and compliant with company policies and regulations Xactly streamlines the management of compensation plans, reduces errors, and ensures compliance through audit trails and reporting capabilities.

Sales Representatives

Sales reps often struggle with visibility into their compensation and understanding how their sales activities link to payouts. Xactly provides real-time visibility into their earnings and detailed insights into how their sales activities contribute to their compensation. It helps them understand the compensation structure and motivates them by clarifying potential earnings from deals.

Executive Teams

Executives need to ensure that the compensation strategy aligns with overall business goals, is cost-effective, and drives the desired business outcomes. Xactly provides executives with analytics and reporting tools to assess the effectiveness of compensation plans.

Sales Managers

Sales managers need to monitor team performance, forecast earnings, and adjust targets or territories. Xactly allows sales managers to track team performance against targets, forecast future performance, and make necessary adjustments to territories or quotas.

Xactly Success Story

One of the largest professional recruiting, consulting, and staffing firms in the world chose Canidium to implement Xactly.

The firm needed a powerful, agile sales compensation platform to fuel its continued growth. Not only was it difficult to manage their complex plans in spreadsheets, but they were also causing accuracy concerns and making it difficult to hit both weekly and monthly commission payouts targets. After a competitive review of available systems, the company selected Xactly Incent and kicked off its implementation.

The Objective

The company had one simple goal: recruiting the best candidates for the best companies. Their growth had been immense, resulting in over 400 salespeople and 1,600 contractors requiring compensation support.

Results

Eliminating more than 1,000 spreadsheets, the firm now has a single source for all of its compensation data and reporting across offices, improving accuracy and cutting commission processing time by 90%. As the sales team also has complete visibility into their sales and statements via easy-to-use dashboards, disputes have been reduced, along with more than 600 weekly commission report emails.

4 Factors Impacting Xactly Incent and Connect Implementation Costs

1. Plan Components: The more intricate and diverse the plan components, the higher the implementation costs, reflecting the increased effort and resources needed for configuring and integrating these elements into the Xactly platform.
2. Commission Hold/Release Automation: The complexity and customization required for automating commission hold and release processes directly influence implementation costs, reflecting the effort required to align compensation practices seamlessly with commission workflows in the Xactly platform.
3. Order Feed Automation: The complexity and depth of order feed automation required directly impact implementation costs, reflecting the effort and customization needed to seamlessly align compensation practices with order workflows within the Xactly platform.
4. HR Automation: The more comprehensive the HR automation required, the higher the implementation costs, reflecting the increased effort and customization needed to seamlessly align compensation practices with HR workflows within the Xactly platform.

Xactly Offerings:

Xactly Incent and Connect Together

With Xactly Incent, organizations can automate and streamline the calculation and management of sales commissions. The added offering of Xactly Connect facilitates smooth data integration, ensuring that incentive-related information seamlessly flows between Xactly Incent and other crucial business systems.

Xactly Forecasting

With Xactly Forecasting, businesses can leverage advanced analytics and data-driven insights to make informed decisions. Canidium's implementation expertise ensures a tailored setup that aligns with the unique forecasting needs of each client.

Xactly Compensation Expense Forecasting (CEF)

CEF is a powerful platform designed to elevate accuracy in expense forecasting for sales compensation. Xactly CEF empowers businesses to harness advanced analytics and data-driven insights, facilitating well-informed decision-making.

Xactly Commissions Expense Accounting (CEA)

Xactly CEA is tailored for comprehensive expense visibility and reporting related to sales commissions. By leveraging this tool, businesses gain insights into commission-related costs, helping them manage expenses effectively and make data-driven decisions.

Xactly Implementation Pricing

Ultimately, project costs are determined by the required implementation roles, the hours per role, and the assigned rate for each role. We've outlined general solution implementation pricing tables below using a simplified "t-shirt sizing" model for small, medium, and large projects.

Xactly Incent and Connect Implementation Pricing:

Xactly Forecasting or CEF Implementation Pricing:

Xactly CEA Implementation Pricing:

Implementing Xactly ICM Software

The implementation process is as vital to your software investment as the solution itself. The project is a complex workflow designed to configure the solution to your unique infrastructure and processes. Heading into an implementation, it helps to understand how the process works. 

Still have questions? You can reach out to our team of experts here.