LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

There has been a lot of industry news in the past few months that I haven’t had time to cover and I’ll start trying to catch up by talking about what has been going on with Xactly.

Xactly just announced that it has expanded its North American operations with new headquarters in San Jose, as well as a regional office in Denver. They added a whooping 80 new customers since the beginning of 2011 (that’s a lot!) and a lot of that growth comes from their Xactly Express solution which recently signed up its 100th customer. Over the last year, Xactly also increased their staff by 54% to support its quick growth.

However, what I’m the most excited about are the enhancements to Xactly Incent Version 7 which launched a few months ago. The new version has several new very important features.

Quota and Rate Table Effective Dating: This enables companies to manage incentive program changes at the time and point of need. This may seem as a not-so-important feature, but from an administration perspective it’s VERY important. It also makes the annual plan updates much more simple to achieve and saves a lot of time on the configuration side. The net effect of this feature is faster end-to-end deployment time, more administration flexibility, and easier/quicker year-end plan updates.

Report Customization:
Reports outside of the analytics module used to be fairly “What you see is what you get”; in other words, not allowing many configuration options. In this new version, there is much more flexibility and reports can be customized to meet specific needs.

Ranking Reports:
New reports are available to provide visibility into individual and team performance.

Xactly Incent 7.1:
Usually Xactly delivers mostly small improvements between minor versions, but version 7.1 added some big features.

Version 7.1 includes the addition of mobile functionalityenabling teams and reps to access reports and performance information through their mobile phone/devices. I personally think that this is a great new feature, particularly for road warriors who don’t have time to access their dashboards. The new release also comes with several improvements to Xactly Territories, eDocs & Approvals. However, Illustrator was a surprise new addition to Incent’s impressive list of recent features:

Illustrator:
Xactly added an Illustrator module to Incent which provides great modeling functionality. Reps can plan measures to forecast associated hypothetical commission. Reports are great, but I always felt that interactive what-if modeling was the best way to drive behavior.

Overall, I am really impressed by the new features released by Xactly in the past few months. Effective dating is something I had been waiting for from them for a long time, and it is what I would qualify as Xactly’s greatest configuration enhancement since the formula copy and paste feature.

Performance
With such an accelerated growth, I was also curious to see if performance would become an issue. I recently had the chance to work with the latest version, and it is still a very responsive SaaS application that can process a fairly large number of transactions quickly.

Conversation with Xactly CEO, Chris Cabrera
I talked with Chris about the future of Xactly, and not surprisingly, he thinks it’s very bright! We talked about many of the features described earlier and also about what the recent growth meant for the company. Chris believes that the trend towards small companies adopting affordable SPM systems such as Xactly Express is only going to accelerate. I initially thought that the Express would only be a “project”, but Chris is optimistic that it could eventually surpass the revenues generated by Xactly Incent. The additional revenues also enabled Xactly to add new members to its executive team, most recently a new VP of marketing and a VP of enterprise sales. Since it is not feasible to contact every small company to sell Xactly Express, a strong marketing strategy is key to its success. Finally, Chris mentioned that in a few years, Xactly would be poised to “go public”, providing additional capital to further accelerate it’s growth and leadership position in its market.