Xactly Delivers New Inspiration for Sales to Maximize its Potential

In an analyst perspective at the beginning of this year I wrote that sales organizations must step beyond conventional wisdom to generate the best outcomes. One such step is to invest in software that delivers immediate value to manage sales and be efficient in its operations. Our latest research on sales organizations finds that inconsistent execution (53%), scattered information (48%) and limited visibility (42%) are motivating investment to improve sales. At CompCloud, its annual conference, Xactly unveiled advances in its software to help improve the effectiveness and productivity of sales organizations. Spokespeople said the company’s sales compensation products have helped users manage US$10 billion in commissions in the past two years.

To make it easier to access critical information from its applications Xactly now supports the range of mobile devices running native Apple iOS, Android and HTML5 apps. The mobile capabilities enable users to view commission statements, track quota attainment and compare performance to team rankings. Xactly is right to advance its mobile efforts as account managers and management extensively use smartphones and tablets. Our latest research in sales finds that smartphones will be deployed to four out of five (81%) in sales and tablets to three-quarters by the end of 2015.

The company also announced the release of Xactly Quota to help management and analysts allocate quota assignments to teams. By automating the quota process and providing visibility into quota performance this application helps reduce manual effort and potential errors in those tasks. The quota management application can link with Xactly Incent to help users plan sales targets and link potential commissions to payments. They can collaborate in designing and agreeing on quotas, and the comments feature enables direct feedback. Our research finds that quota attainment is the top way to measure overall sales performance, so this feature is likely to please Xactly’s customers and increase sales. After aligning quotas and commissions, the next logical advance would be to help users manage sales forecasts to support progress toward quotas and ultimately commissions. Comparing quotas to forecasts is a top priority for sales teams, according to our research. Xactly’s products can integrate forecasts into its analytics, which is a key first step to assess to quota and potential commission. I have already written that dedicated technology enables successful forecasting.

At the conference I got to review demonstrations of its analytics and benchmarks in Xactly Insights that help provide performance metrics from all the data it collects from its customers. Such measures can be useful: Xactly released a report on performance and quotas showing that 79 percent of sales reps selling software as a service miss their quotas. These insights help provide a guideline to where a company can improve in the design of its quotas which Xactly released a new application but also where it compares in the market to others. Xactly has been able to take the aggregate of its own customers’ metrics in using their products to provide some insightful perspective on a range of compensation and time related sales metrics.

Xactly unveiled Xactly Objectives at its 2013 conference that I covered, and we named it the prestigious 2013 Technology Innovation Award winner for sales. Now the product is fully localized to support Spanish, French, German and other languages. It is easy for managers and sales reps to track progress toward their overall objectives. Having a system to identify overarching sales objectives and link them to sales compensation is important to motivate and guide personnel on a regular basis. The Xactly Objectives can be used anywhere in an organization too, which makes it appealing to any department.

Other improvements outlined at this year’s conference included more comprehensive incentive statements, analytics that can be displayed in any HTML5-compliant Web browser, flexibility in plan rules with lookup tablets and adaptations to credit allocations. Xactly continued focus on satisfying its customers through product improvements have provided it a very high customer retention rate.

Xactly continues to focus on inspiring sales management and operations to making sales more productive and generate higher level of sales. Its software is more appropriate for sales compensation and related processes than CRM or SFA applications and much better than using general-purpose spreadsheets. Our research finds that more than half of sales organizations still use spreadsheets for these purpose and that doing this undermines their ability to manage sales with accurate information. In today’s intensely competitive sales environment, Xactly is positioned to grow. Sales organizations that seek to improve these sales and compensation processes and provide the information that sales teams need both to perform well and be satisfied in their jobs should examine Xactly’s software.

Regards,

Mark Smith

CEO and Chief Research Officer

Businesses Can Turn to Scribe for Integration in the Cloud Anytime

Businesses continue to try to increase productivity and simplify tasks in order to use their time smarter. Our recent business technology innovation research found that, when it comes to analytics, 44 percent of organizations spend the most time on data-related tasks. With lack of resources being the largest issue impeding the adoption of technology, IT must operate efficiently while getting business the data it needs on a timely basis. Scribe Solutions has a business-centric data integration solution that operates in the cloud. Over the last 15 years Scribe has accumulated more than 12,000 customers worldwide that span from Fortune 500 to midsize to small organizations. Scribe enables business to access marketing and sales data (part of CRM) like that in Microsoft Dynamics. It has built a strong presence indirectly and through Microsoft partners; it claims to have more than 1,000 partners, and has been expanding efforts to broaden its position by supporting a range of data sources, including Salesforce.com.  Scribe focuses on what I call information optimization, providing value from information management investments, as I outlined in our research agenda.

Scribe addresses multipoint integration that cuts across departments and across on-premises and cloud computing environments.  Our research into data in the cloud found lack of implementation resources to be the major obstacle in 31 percent of organizations. Scribe’s product Scribe Online operates in the cloud and facilitates the integration of on-premises and cloud-based environments. It provides a replication service that helps get a copy of data from one point to many and ensures that data is available when users need it. This is especially important when you have a multitude of applications in the cloud for marketing, sales and customer services that need to interoperate, and if you need data that is generated in another application or is in a legacy on-premises application.

Scribe’s latest release simplifies the visual integration environment and provides some core functionality to expand its value to business. Its Integration Service enables synchronization processes to update as data is generated and provides methods to transform data to a form used by an organization’s business intelligence or analytics software. Scribe enables these capabilities through integration agents deployed with the applications.

I got a product demonstration that provided insight to the usability of the product, which our data in the cloud benchmark found was the most important evaluation criteria according to 56% of organizations. Scribe has built an approach that is usable by business. It lets users position graphical blocks that comprise integrations, eliminating the need for a DBA, though data-savvy professionals can set up the configuration of the blocks to enable business to access to data at any time in a safe and governed manner. Business analysts can easily adjust parameters to the blocks and change them to meet their needs. I also tried out Scribe’s free trial software, which was easy to activate and use. I do think the software trial could have pre-built demonstrations of integration to make it easier to get started. Its approach is especially nice for those who need to quickly get data into their spreadsheets for analysis. Our latest research into spreadsheets found that combining spreadsheets is time-consuming in more than half (56%) of organizations, mostly due to getting the data into the right shape for combining – a process Scribe Online can assist with.

Scribe provides a range of connectors to applications and systems, and a new Connector Development Kit that can help partners and customers extend the technology to meet a range of custom and specific application needs. Scribe has also announced a marketplace for partners that can be found embedded within the software to make it easy to use these connectors. I would like the company to highlight the marketplace outside of the software and on its website, as it is a significant part of Scribe’s value.

Scribe works well for marketing and sales teams that need to integrate marketing automation and sales force automation systems. Its software integrates with a broad spectrum of applications other data integration providers can’t manage, such as Exact Target, Silverpop, On24 and customer billing systems such as Intuit and FinancialForce. Scribe just announced support for Marketo, one of the fastest-growing marketing automation applications in cloud computing, which supports the demand and revenue generation needs of organizations, and for Xactly, which is used for sales compensation and incentives. It is expanding the number of connectors to applications through partners such as Datix, which resells Epicor.

I was impressed by the way Scribe’s offering makes data integration simpler for business while providing integration into applications for marketing, sales, customer services and accounting systems. Today, when organizations have systems dispersed across online environments that need data shared across applications or integrated into a unified environment for analytics, Scribe Online is a great step forward. Having software that can align business and IT is essential, as less than a fifth (19%) work together well for the information needs of an organization, according to our information management research. Scribe can provide significant value here, empowering business to do its own integration in a secured and governed manner. If it continues to expand its application connectivity to the providers that deliver value to the SMB market, it will have a great growth opportunity.

If you are looking to empower business to access and integrate data, take a look at Scribe Software and its latest Scribe Online release. It is pretty easy, and you should try it for yourself.

Regards,

Mark Smith

CEO & Chief Research Officer