Is your incentive compensation management software not Xactly working out? Does your sales team utilize your ICM dashboard? Are your compensation plans and your ICM enemies? Do you need to pay for expensive pro services to make changes to your compensation plans?...Xactly. We hear you and hear a lot from organizations that feel your pain.
At Performio, we have solved the fundamental issue widespread in our industry–overly-rigid applications that cannot adapt to your needs, or overly-flexible ones that become impossible to maintain over time. Performio eliminates the inevitable “rat’s nest” of logic that leads to miscalculations and inefficiencies over the long run. Unfortunately, most ICMs are okay for a bit, but over time, aren’t able to adapt to changes and scale. You need something for the journey ahead, sales comp is a marathon, not a sprint, that’s why Performio is the last ICM you’ll ever need.
When shopping for Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) software, Performio and Xactly frequently make their way onto a sales comp admin’s list of options. Both solutions have a long track record and a large customer base, but how do they stack up next to each other?
In this article, we’ll walk you through the similarities and differences between Xactly and Performio, compare how each performs in the areas that matter most, and help you make an informed decision.
After surveying the key differences between the two, we’ll cover how each ICM approaches:
- Sales comp plan management
- Self-service changes
- Customer support
- Data integration
- User interface
- Scalability
Performio vs. Xactly: key differences
We’ll start with a brief overview of where Performio and Xactly diverge before providing a more detailed comparison.
- Sales comp plan management: Both platforms avoid reliance on difficult-to-manage formulas, but Performio’s component-based solution offers far greater flexibility than Xactly’s rule-based system.
- Self-service plan changes: Performio empowers sales comp admins to make any changes to plans themselves using our structured plan builder. Xactly requires support from customer service for all but the most basic adjustments.
- Customer support: Performio offers world-class customer support, taking 8.5 hours on average to resolve issues. Xactly can take as long as 48 just to respond, and they frequently drop tickets.
- Data imports: Performio allows users to import data from any source, converting it automatically. This allows for complete data flexibility and doesn’t let your lack of data flexibility dictate you comp plans. Xactly only integrates with select systems and requires manual editing of data for anything else.
- Dashboard UI/UX: Customers report that sales reps love using Performio’s dashboard to track their progress. By contrast, sales reps find Xactly’s interface to be clunky and don’t use it.
- Scalability: Performio scales with your organization, no matter how many sales reps you employ. Xactly becomes increasingly difficult to use the larger your organization grows.
Sales comp plan management
Managing your sales comp plan is the most essential function any ICM platform needs to perform. You use this tool to create, modify, and implement your plan, so it’s crucial to ensure that it’s up to the task. And not all ICM software is created equally on this front. When comparing ICMs like Performio and Xactly, this is the most important difference to determine.
There are three fundamentally different ways that ICM solutions approach sales comp management: with formulas, rules, or components.
Formulas are at the bottom of the barrel. They’re complicated to use, prone to errors, and a huge waste of time. Most formula-based ICM solutions are just glorified spreadsheets, so you might as well have stuck with Excel. Thankfully, neither Xactly nor Performio rely on formulas.
Xactly uses rules, which offer some improvements over formulas. They’re much simpler to work with, as you don’t have to learn special syntax or type in calculations by hand. Instead, rules allow you to manage your plans with a series of if/then statements based on predefined parameters you select from dropdown menus. This saves time and limits human errors.
However, rules also come with significant drawbacks. They work well enough for simple, straightforward plans, but they start to break down when you introduce any level of complexity. That’s because the predefined components and simplistic if/then structures just weren’t made to handle more advanced scenarios.
Resourceful sales comp admins can sometimes work around these limitations by nesting rules within rules, creating a convoluted solution that adds a bit more capability, but that becomes a nightmare to troubleshoot when something goes wrong. And let’s be honest, your ICM solution should be working for you, not against you. You shouldn’t have to come up with a complicated workaround just to get the basic functionality you need.
Unlike Xactly, Performio uses components for sales comp plan management, which offer the best of all worlds. Like rules, they’re far simpler to use than formulas, and they don’t introduce the unnecessary risk of human errors. But unlike rules, they aren’t limited to predefined parameters and basic logic.
With components, you build your plans in a graphical user interface with click-to-configure components and guided workflows. Pre-built components are included to save time, as they will handle the majority of your needs, but you’ll never be limited by them. Everything is fully customizable, and you can add functionality for anything you need—no matter how complex your sales comp plans may become.
Additionally, components are entirely reusable. After creating a custom component once, you can simply duplicate and modify it for future use, which is something else that rule-based systems like Xactly can’t offer.
Bottom line on sales comp plan management: both Xactly and Performio avoid the headaches and limitations caused by a dated, formula-based approach to comp planning. But Performio’s component-based system is more flexible and scalable than Xactly’s rule-based system.
Self-service changes
Your sales comp plan isn’t something you can just set and forget. Not only will you need to make adjustments when the plan isn’t motivating sales reps as intended, but you’ll also need the ability to make quick and frequent changes based on external factors like new competitors or shifting customer demand. If you’re unable to make changes to your plan quickly, you could be leaving revenue on the table.
With Performio, every aspect of your sales comp plan is accessible for you to make changes yourself. And any change you make to one component automatically updates any other elements that reference it, so you don’t have to worry about a change in one place breaking something elsewhere. This allows you to stay on top of changing circumstances, and ensure that your sales reps are always working with the plan that will best incentivize them.
The same can’t be said for Xactly. Outside of quotas, sales comp admins can’t safely change anything themselves. The rule-based structure makes it exceedingly difficult to change other elements without breaking the logic that connects one rule to another.
That leaves you with two options. You could either try to make a change yourself, and when something inevitably breaks, be left with a completely non-functional plan until customer service can help you get it sorted. (This can take days.) Or you could call them up first and have them make the change for you. Either way, you’ll have to pay their consultation fees to get them to step in for you, and you’ll waste valuable time for something you should have been able to do yourself.
Bottom line on self-service changes: Performio empowers sales comp admins to make changes themselves. Xactly would rather you contact customer service—and pay to do it.
Customer support
The lack of self-service capabilities with Xactly means you’ll need to call their customer service a lot more frequently than Performio’s, but either way, everyone eventually needs help. And when that time comes, you expect prompt and efficient service. So how do Performio and Xactly compare when responding to customer needs?
Xactly doesn’t have a great track record. They can take as long as 48 hours just to respond to a new request, and then much longer after that to actually resolve the issue. And their support doesn’t come cheap either, as their fees can really add up.
When customers migrate to Performio from Xactly, they frequently cite poor support among their reasons for making the change. For example, here’s what Anh Ung, Finance Controller, FP&A European department at Dräger had to say about their experience with Xactly:
“The more we needed help, the less help we could get because the customer support people who really understood the product and our requirements had left the company. We were always boxed in and could not grow. Our plans were in the same layout for ten years. Furthermore, over the past few years we experienced very poor customer service. They would even drop our cases without resolution and not communicate with us properly.”
And Lauren Wechsler, Human Resource Specialist at Yorktel, expressed a similar sentiment:
“Because Xactly’s customer support process was broken, we ended up having to figure out the issue ourselves. We knew there had to be a better product and solution out there.”
By contrast, Performio makes it a priority to offer the best customer support in the industry, with a 99.7% customer satisfaction rating. Performio’s average time to resolve an issue is only 8.5 hours—and that’s from the time you send a request to the moment your problem is fixed. Customers rave about the support they receive.
“The customer service has been fantastic. The white glove service is amazing and knowing we have this kind of support makes our jobs so much easier.” —Lauren Wechsler, Yorktel
Bottom line on customer support: Performio prioritizes customer satisfaction and resolves issues as quickly as possible. Xactly takes their time—if they ever address the issue at all.
Data integration
Incentive compensation management involves a lot of collaboration between different teams and departments, and that includes sharing data from one platform to another. Since every platform has their own way of storing data, you can end up doing a lot of manual editing to get each system to understand the other’s data.
That often means downloading the data from one source as a spreadsheet or database, renaming headers, rearranging orders, combining or separating columns or fields, dropping some of them altogether, and various other changes to ensure that it’s readable to the receiving system. It’s a pain to do once, and it’s a logistical nightmare to do over and over again, every time you need to transfer data.
This is a frequent problem with Xactly, as their platform is only capable of integrating with a few key systems. If you need to integrate data from any non-supported systems, you’ll have to go through an unnecessarily laborious process to import the data.
With Performio, you never have to worry about data imports and exports holding you back. Performio adapts to you, not the other way around. You can import your data from any source, in any format and structure, and Performio will perform the conversion process for you. And the same goes for exporting data from Performio: you can easily output your data in any format and structure you need to use in other systems.
Bottom line on data integration: With Performio, all your integrations are automatic and seamless. With Xactly, you’ll spend significant time manually converting data.
User interface
The sales comp admin won’t be the only one using your ICM software—or at least they shouldn’t be. In addition to managing sales comp plans and calculating commissions, the ICM platform also provides transparency and insights for other parties, including managers, heads of other departments, and sales reps.
For sales reps in particular, the ICM platform is an invaluable tool that allows them to see all of their sales activities at a glance, including what they’ve sold, how much they’re earning, and how far along they are toward meeting their goals and quotas. Without this, sales reps typically end up resorting to shadow accounting—unauthorized attempts to track their own progress via spreadsheets and homebrewed calculations. Shadow accounting causes far more problems than it solves, but you’ll only be able to prevent it if reps are actually willing to log into and use their ICM dashboard.
That’s a problem for Xactly. Surveying publicly available user reviews of Xactly, the overwhelming sentiment is that “The user interface feels old, some of the features, or lack thereof, seem outdated” and that “The user interface can be complex and overwhelming.” It’s bad enough for the sales comp admin to have to jump through hoops to learn the interface, but you can’t expect all your sales reps to do the same.
By contrast, Performio’s easy-to-use interface is another aspect customers rave about:
“Our reps love that they can review their dashboards and see what their payouts would be if they hit their targets.” —Diana Estrada, Sales Compensation Analyst, Contentful
“Performio really stood out for its superior user interface. We knew with Performio that the users would like using the software and feel comfortable with it.” —Jason Bass, President and General Manager, AVEVA Select Central
In Performio, everything is laid out intuitively, using role-based access to show each party exactly what they need to see and nothing that they shouldn’t.
Bottom line on user interface: Sales reps love using Performio’s dashboard to track their progress. They often refuse to log into Xactly because it feels so dated and confusing.
Scalability
As your organization grows and expands, your ICM solution needs to scale alongside you. The key to this scalability lies in all the points of comparison we’ve already covered.
For a small business with only a handful of sales reps, it may be viable to deal with the problems created by Xactly. Your sales comp plans won’t be all that complicated yet, so a rules-based system will suffice. Changes to the plan will be less frequent, so you won’t have to deal with customer support very often. A smaller company means less data to transfer. And with only a few employees, it doesn’t matter as much that they have to deal with a clunky and outdated interface.
But the more your organization grows, the more sales reps you’ll bring onboard, and the more complex your sales comp plans will become, the more time you’ll waste and money you’ll lose by finding workarounds to a subpar system. The longer you wait to make the switch, the harder it will become to transition.
Performio’s ICM platform works equally well at any scale—whether you have 5 sales reps or 5,000. The things you loved about Performio as a smaller organization will become things you could not live without once you reach the scale to truly appreciate how much time and money they’re saving you.
Bottom line on scalability: Performio was designed to grow with your business, so you’ll never have to look for another ICM again. The same can’t be said for Xactly, which becomes more difficult to use the longer you’re with them.
See for yourself why customers love Performio
At Performio, we’ve been in the ICM game a long time, and that’s due in no small part to the fact that our customers stick with us. Once they see how much Performio has to offer, they don’t want to use anything else. In fact, most of our customers have been with us for 10+ years.
We go out of our way at every turn to ensure our customers receive the best possible experience, with the most powerful ICM platform at their fingertips.
Want to see what Performio can do for your business? Request a demo today.