According to a Mordor Intelligence report, the global sales performance management market is expected to grow at 13% CAGR from $2.83 billion in 2019. San Jose-based Xactly has been a leading provider of cloud-based sales performance management (SPM) software. Earlier this year, it was tagged a Leader by Gartner in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for SPM for the seventh consecutive time.

Xactly’s Offerings

Xactly was set up in 2005 by Christopher Cabrera and Satish Palvai to offer a compensation offering that operated on a SaaS model instead of the traditional license-based model. It soon became a leading cloud-based, multi-tenant provider of enterprise-class, cloud-based, incentive compensation solutions for employee and SPM that helps organizations drive employee behavior and performance while ensuring growth in margins, efficiencies, and achievement of strategic goals.

Till 2015, Xactly was venture funded, and had raised $90 million from investors including Illuminate Ventures, Bridgescale Partners, Rembrandt Venture Partners, Outlook Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Glynn Capital Management, Alloy Ventures, Bay Partners, Cheyenne Capital, and Spinner Asset Management. In 2015, it went public on the NYSE and raised $56 million at a valuation of $304 million. But in 2017, Vista Equity Partners acquired Xactly for an estimated $564 million. Since Xactly went private, it stopped disclosing its financials. Prior to the acquisition, Xactly had recorded revenues of $95.5 million with a net loss of $16.9 million for fiscal 2017. Last year, the company announced that it had recorded its biggest growth in its fourteen year history and had a portfolio of 1,600 customers.

Xactly’s Product Growth

Under Vista’s guidance, Xactly continues to deliver significant product enhancements that leverage AI and target integrations with other tech solutions. Earlier this year, it announced an enhancement to its SPM Platform – Xactly Forms. Forms is an interactive product that uses AI logic to drive collaboration across business processes. Xactly sources user-defined historical data to identify organizational patterns in sales, bookings, and employee attrition, so that leaders have detailed insight into their sales activities. Forms can predict factors that affect seasonality, such as headcount, new hire ramp-up, and early-stage quota-setting to help align planning with business objectives.

It also announced the release of Xactly Show Me, another product enhancement within the Xactly platform that allows customers to reduce onboarding time, increase administrator knowledge, and drive user adoption. Powered by Pendo Adopt, an OEM product from Pendo, Show Me integrates employee training inside Xactly so that customers can self-serve features such as personalize content, standardize policies, and improve the overall user experience. It allows end-users to get the guidance they need for their daily workflow, specific to roles and requirements. Administrators can create content such as banners and step-by-step guides. And finally, end-users can leverage these new assets to better understand their compensation plans.  

In April this year, Xactly announced its integration with Slack. As part of the integration, the two will introduce a first-of-its-kind app for sales reps to track their performance within Slack using Xactly Incent. Xactly Incent is Xactly’s sales incentive compensation management software. The new Slack app will allow sales reps to monitor their commissions and quota attainment in real time, within their Slack workflow. Sales reps will be able to submit queries when data errors appear, thus getting a transparent insight into their compensation. Since Slack is already used as a collaboration tool during the workday, Xactly believes it is an ideal channel for sales reps to access relevant updates in one place.