Xactly, RightNow Team Up for CRM Alliance

Xactly Corporation, a vendor of automated on-demand sales compensation management, has announced that they are working on a strategic alliance with RightNow Technologies.

Motivating sales and service staff is "a critical component to any customer experience strategy," Xactly officials say, adding that "focused and well compensated sales representatives are more likely to provide the high touch experience customers expect."

"Xactly Incent is an excellent complement to RightNow's offerings," said Christopher W. Cabrera, Xactly founder, president and CEO. "By teaming with RightNow, Xactly will be able to provide clients with on-demand sales, services and compensation management."

Xactly's contention is that giving sales and services personnel with real-time visibility into their sales compensation and performance will help organizations better align sales teams.

The combination of Xactly Incent's rules-based, services-oriented architecture, and RightNow's solutions is being marketed as a way to "help organization clients in such diverse industries as high technology, telecom, travel and hospitality, public sector, education and financial services build compensation plans that are specific to their organizations," according to RightNow officials.

For example, RightNow Service customers will be able to design variable compensation plans for service or call center employees based on the key performance indicators that mean the most to their business success such as response time, call volume, new versus completed cases, call resolution or average handling time.

"Today's customers have unprecedented choice and control," said Greg Gianforte, CEO and founder of RightNow. "Superior customer experiences are the only definitive way to retain and expand relationships with customers. Compensating and motivating sales and service staff is a step in delivering these types of stellar interactions."

Prior to the advent of Xactly Incent, company officials say, companies "had to rely on spreadsheets to manage sales compensation or alternative enterprise products which were simply too expensive, time consuming and difficult to implement for all but the largest companies."

Earlier this year Xactly announced that Markinekt Professional Resources, a staffing agency that helps media and entertainment companies, advertising agencies and marketing departments find personnel, has deployed Xactly Incent for AppExchange to automate sales compensation management.

Karen Steele, Xactly vice president of marketing, called Xactly Incent a product "for customers like Markinekt who are looking to extend their salesforce investment" and motivate staff.

Xactly Incent provides integration to Salesforce and delivers a sales compensation application in an on-demand model. Xactly Incent's patent-pending Incentive Estimator provides salesforce customers with the ability to run "what-if" scenarios based on salesforce opportunities or estimated sales to calculate potential commission and bonus estimates and payments before, during and after a sale.

Implementing Xactly Incent at Markinekt was handled by Astadia Consulting, LLC.

In December Xactly and Intacct Corporation, which sells on-demand financial applications, announced what officials of both companies are calling "a strategic sales and marketing partnership to help drive customer adoption" and market awareness for their on-demand sales compensation and financial management products.

The companies will go to market with this partnership via a series of collaborative lead-sharing and lead-generation initiatives that will kick off in 2007.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.

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