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Using Xactly Incent - A Sales Commission Manager's Perspective
March 17, 2014

Using Xactly Incent - A Sales Commission Manager's Perspective

Jesse Duncan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Xactly Incent 9.8

Modules Used

  • Analytics
  • Incent

Overall Satisfaction

Xactly is used by the entire company to pay commissions to sales reps, both direct and indirect. I am using it for the indirect (outside sales) partners. Xactly is calculating and making the commissions reports available to these sales partners through their website.
  • Xactly allows the users/admins to completely tailor the calculations to what is needed
  • Xactly allows users to upload to a secure FTP site all of the needed data to calculate commissions
  • Xactly is very consistent and each month there are correct calculations, provided your rules, and formulas are correct. If not you would not get the desired results.
  • Customer support is superior, any issues the support team is on it right after you open a ticket, and they know exactly what is the issue. (Usually on the user's part)
  • The number one issue is the website. It is quite clunky for today's browsers. You will be using at least two different browsers to get stuff done. Firefox v15 (although Firefox is at 27 only 15 is supported) and IE 9 any version > IE 9 is not compatible.
  • The rules and formulas that are user definable, and also are the heart of correct commissions, are not intuitive at all. You will need a skilled IT person who was involved with the initial implementation to make changes. it is very frustrating and time consuming to muddle through making changes for anyone else. And if you have little to no IT skill, impossible. Xactly may help you down the road, but you cannot count on it, and you always feel they are being kind to help. Which they are.
  • Analytics reporting which is based off of Oracle BI is also the reporting tool for getting your data in a reportable form. See point two, this is not easy to navigate, and the users will need to spend some serious time getting up to speed with creating these reports. there is a learning curve. But if the users have this experience then it becomes second nature, and even fun.
  • Number one and overall is more accurate and consistent commission calculations. Once the Application is tailored to your need, the performance is great.
  • Visibility to the sales reps - They can go online using the webiste and login credentials and view their commission calculations at anytime. Even iPads can be used. A number of reports can be made by the admins for the sales teams to view. Xactly also give some nice canned reports as well
  • Sales reps feel beeter about their commissions when they cansee their revenue down at a product level and see how that works out to a payment.
I have used Incentive before. I feel that Xactly is superior. There were some nice features with Incentive, but it did not allow reps to view their statements, which is a super feature with Xactly. While I did not make the decision to select Xactly I am totally happy with it. Incentive no longer supported the version we were using, and it eventually broke down leaving no choice but spreadsheets for several months. Xactly has great support and we generally enjoy it.
Our company is totally invested in Xactly with close to 2000 reps being paid out of it. We have 3 instances and there is no other method to calculate commissions. I feel the cost (although I do not know the amount) is also very competitive for the benefits.
I feel that due to the customization ability of Xactly, and the skill set of the Xactly folks, it can be used for almost any commission scenario with success. The way that Xactly calculates and reports on the commission data you load is a pleasure to work with. The main question to ask is what is the support like , and what if we need to change or modify the plan down the road after the implementation. Users, unless specifically trained during the implementation may be ineffective alone to change the plans or make modifications.

Product Usage

6 - From director to analysts.
3 - No one has IT skills that actually support or are "real" users. Most are just loading data to FTP and click the Delta run jobs on the site. There is one person (me) for the Indirect sales commissions that actually have experience making plan, rule and formula changes. I learned on my own with some guidance from the Xactly person that coded our plans, and mostly because I enjoyed the challenge.
  • commisssions
  • document management (plan acceptance)
  • commission statement visibility
  • internal objectives for non sales related employees
  • advanced reporting for sales reps

Usability

When the commission structure (plans, rules, formulas etc) is set, it works great and there is no fluctuation. But getting to that point or having to change course once arrived, keeps it from being a 10,
ProsCons
Like to use
Consistent
Feel confident using
Unnecessarily complex
Requires technical support
Slow to learn
Lots to learn
  • FTP process
  • Order upload
  • User setup
  • Change or delete an order or batch
  • Analytics reporting
  • Changing or adding a commission rule
  • Changing the plans
Yes, but I don't use it