Upcoming Webinar: Motivate and recognize your top performers with non-cash rewards programs and incentives

This upcoming webinar expands on one of our previous posts:
The Power of Linking Non-Cash Incentives to CRM


Introducing Xactly Rewards for Salesforce Force.com: Leverage your CRM Investment & Increase Adoption

Motivate and recognize your top performers with non-cash reward programs integrated directly with your Salesforce application. Empower your sales, marketing, support and call center teams to effectively run contests, special performance incentive funds (SPIFs) and other incentive programs with immediate redemption for millions of leading brand merchandise items, travel & leisure options, tickets for theatre, concerts and sporting events and more.

Join Xactly and Astadia as we discuss the impact this new and innovative application can make throughout your organization.

Date: Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00PM PST

Join us and learn how to get your first 90 days free!

Register to learn more: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/602120293

When it comes to incenting behaviors non-cash rewards are typically under-utilized, yet they can be extremely effective in driving behavior in ways that cash compensation can’t. Cash is king, but cash is impersonal and predictable. Non-cash rewards, on the other hand, are extremely engaging when the prize is something that the targeted recipient truly wants and considers worth striving for. In fact, a University of Chicago study found that using non-cash incentives improved employee performance by 38.6% vs. 14.6% for cash rewards.

With Xactly Rewards for Force.com, you can quickly automate these programs and tie them to activity in your Salesforce CRM application while providing immediate access to the widest possible selection of value-oriented tangible rewards.

Join Xactly and Astadia to learn how this revolutionary application can impact the performance of your sales, marketing, service, support and call centers.

Register to learn more: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/602120293

Learn more about Xactly Rewards for Force.com: http://www.xactlycorp.com/resource_center/Rewards_ds.pdf

The Power of Linking Non-Cash Incentives to CRM

When it comes to incenting behaviors, non-cash rewards are typically under-utilized, yet they can be extremely effective in driving behavior in ways that cash compensation can’t. Cash is king, but cash is impersonal and predictable. Non-cash rewards, on the other hand, are extremely engaging when the prize is something that the targeted recipient truly wants and considers worth striving for. A vacation at the beach. An adventure package. Designer fashions. A day at the spa. That new set of golf clubs. The key is to let each individual decide what prizes motivate them the most – call it self-personalization – and then show them a way to attain them through their go-the-extra-mile actions. All-too-predictable fixed-prize contests don’t come close in their ability to engage desire and personalize motivation. And those gift cards? Twenty-seven percent of them are tossed away, estimates Consumer Reports.

So how do you leverage non-cash rewards effectively? There are several steps. The first is to automate their management. One reason today’s non-cash incentives are treated as one-offs and limited to fixed-prize giveaways is because they are tracked manually, typically in spreadsheets. Hence they have to be simplified. When you apply the same type of automation to tracking these contests as you do with tracking your sales leads and progress via your CRM application, you can start developing sophisticated, yet easily manageable, non-cash incentive programs precisely tailored for each specific audience or individual within the sales organization or across the entire company.

The next step is drive performance by delivering the widest possible selection of value-oriented tangible rewards. Give each person something personally meaningful to shoot for. Give them the ability them rack up points, with the points immediately redeemable for the prizes of their choice. This means leveraging the Internet for prize selection and points redemption, as well as for the power of instant gratification.

The final step is integrating your non-cash rewards program management with your CRM application. From a process standpoint, this provides the ability to tie actions to points automatically – for example, a lead becomes qualified, then points are automatically assigned and immediately viewable within the CRM application. From a visibility and instant-gratification standpoint, recipients and their management gain the ability to check earned and redeemed point balances at any time while logged into the CRM application, and instantly redeem their points online. And from an ongoing motivational standpoint, they can see how they earned their points, and how they can earn more.

We recently had a little fun in creating a video that promotes our Xactly Rewards product, which addresses the complexity of creating and managing an effective non-cash rewards program. Enjoy!

SaaS 2.0? Predictions for the year ahead.

2007 was a momentous year for Software as a Service (SaaS), as it emerged as a disruptive force in an increasingly complacent industry. And while it would be easy to say that growing customer interest will propel SaaS to new heights in 2008, I believe there’s something going on right now that is about more than mere market momentum. From my viewpoint, SaaS is becoming increasingly savvy, and it isn’t too far-fetched to think we’ll soon being talking in terms of SaaS 2.0.

Here’s what I mean. In 2007, we were still witnessing the first generation of many SaaS solutions. Their limited functionality led to criticism that they weren’t as robust as their enterprise software counterparts. In 2008, we will see more SaaS companies building out or partnering to provide more robust solutions and platforms, along the lines of salesforce.com’s Force.com platform.

This is already happening in the market in which Xactly competes, as Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) offerings are morphing into full-blown Sales Performance Management (SPM) solutions, with rich analytics and functionality such as territory and quota management.

Just as exciting to me, SaaS will breathe new life into struggling enterprise software sectors in 2008, and will create entirely new sectors by lowering the cost of entry vis a vis traditional software models. This is huge. And the fast-expanding SPM segment is proof that it is starting to happen.

At the same time, SaaS will create entirely new ecosystems. In 2007, we witnessed the delivery of mash-ups combining data and SaaS functionality via single sign-on. In 2008, we will see SaaS companies supporting end-to-end processes and seamless user experiences through deep integration, software suites, or partnerships.

And through it all, SaaS vendors will only get smarter about customer needs. The advantage of managing all customer deployments under a single umbrella, as SaaS vendors do, is that we are better able to find common threads across customer problems, needs and desires. And customers don’t have to wait for the next release cycle—which, in the enterprise software world can mean waiting a year or more—for a SaaS vendor to implement major fixes and changes across the board. In fact, SaaS vendors are free to be innovative and practically impelled to deliver ever more value, because we are developing a single line of code for one platform shared by all users.

Finally, in 2008, Wall Street will increasingly wake up to SaaS as we witness an up-tick in SaaS IPOs, despite the down market predicted for the first half of the year. The recent successful IPO of Xactly partner and customer, SuccessFactors, is likely a harbinger of things to come. Along these lines, Wall Street bankers, investors and enterprise customers will come to see the distinction between tactical SaaS applications that conveniently automate non-mission critical business functions like recruiting versus truly strategic SaaS applications like SPM, which are at the center of driving business growth and profits.

Okay, I admit to a bias. But, as the SaaS industry matures, I firmly believe it will continue to burn a hole right through traditional software models throughout the rest of this decade and beyond. Whether we call it SaaS 2.0 or not, the SaaS we’ll come to know in 2008 will be light-years ahead of the SaaS we knew in 2007— in terms of functionality, robustness and appeal and, most importantly, in its ability to game-change a customer’s competitiveness and profit picture.