Sprint …a cautionary tale. Beware the business-critical ramifications of badly managed sales compensation

Anyone happen to see the recent news item highlighting what can happen when companies engage in non-effective sales compensation management in December 2nd’s Information Week?

The article says “Sprint is facing a lawsuit from thousands of its store employees who say the wireless carrier has failed to pay them proper commissions.” It goes on to state that “19,000 former and current employees are potentially affected,” and that it was the integration of Sprint and Nextel’s back-end systems that led “to more than $5 million in lost commissions.” Ouch!

According to the article, court documents say that Sprint knew there was a computer problem, spent $10 million to fix it, and “did not acknowledge employees hadn’t been paid correct commission.” Double ouch.

From my perspective, regardless of whether the commissions were paid correctly or not, the damage is done. And it is considerable.

There’s nothing like having your employees this riled up – not to mention 19,000 of them. Hence the first question facing any company in this unfortunate position is how much trust – and indeed motivation – will their employees have going forward? There’s a lot of damage needing to be repaired – and that’s true whether you have 19,000 reps or 19. Then there’s the enormous financial impact around the settlement to deal with. And all the time and effort that will go into handling the case and its aftermath. And the potential for balance-sheet revisions and corporate financial restatements. And the erosion of shareholder and analyst confidence.

But the clincher is, this is the type of corporate mess that can so easily be avoided. Providing sales reps with real-time, web-based visibility into their commission plans can help nip a problem like this in the bud, long before it snowballs to class-action suit status. This visibility, combined with accurate, rules-based commissions calculation (emphasis on rules-based), is the foundation for effective sales compensation management.

And the bedrock on which this foundation rests is the effective integration of all the data used to determine compensation. Any competent compensation-management solution absolutely has to get this right. And, with the advent of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, it doesn’t take a lot of costly on-premise software and expensive consultants to nail this particular kind of data integration either, at least not anymore.

Finally, complete compensation audit trails are mandatory, and entirely possible. The attorney representing Sprint’s store clerks alleged the company made the internal process for appealing shortages in commissions too “time-consuming and burdensome.”

Sprint is a reputable company, and it’s certainly not in its interest to purposefully, as the article has it, “shaft employees.” The company obviously needs to overhaul its current compensation-management process, and fast.

You don’t have to be the size of Sprint to take a lesson here. Sales compensation management is a business-critical function for any organization. It doesn’t pay to confuse, betray and anger the employees that feed you, no matter how inadvertently it may happen. And there’s certainly no excuse for it with state-of-the-art SaaS-based sales compensation management solutions that are available today.

Ride the Economic Wind…Don’t Get Blown Away in ‘09

It’s been a wild economic ride—slide, many would call it—this past year. And the only thing certain about the coming year is that it will be shaped, squeezed and knocked around by continued consumer uncertainty. Because buying cycles promise to be so unpredictable in 2009, companies need to equip their sales organizations to be able to move smoothly and productively with the dynamics of the business and with the gyrations of local and global markets.

This means acting right now to put in place highly adaptable sales compensation plans for 2009 that enable sales and finance to align with corporate objectives, both long and short term, and clear a path for meeting them. Today more than ever, to hesitate is to lose.

Nonetheless, despite the enormous stakes, experience tells us that only half of all 2009 sales plans will be ready for primetime come January. And if that isn’t dismal enough, regardless of whether they’re delivered late or on time, the vast majority of these plans will be dumbed-down or else overly complex and confusing. Either way, they’ll be ineffective at a pivotal time.

But experience also shows us a way out of this dilemma. Here, distilled into seven key practices, is what you need to do in order to arm sales to make the most of the coming uncertain year:

1. Automate. It worked for CRM. Now try it for sales compensation management. Companies still using spreadsheets to manage compensation are pouring scarce administrative dollars down the drain. Worse, they’ll never be able to achieve top sales performance because they lack the requisite visibility, flexibility, scalability and accuracy that come with automation. You should wish this problem on your competition, not yourself.

2. Model. Don’t rush blindly into implementing new plans or plan changes. This is no time to experiment. Model your plans and plan changes up front to gauge their impact. If you’ve automated, modeling shouldn’t be hard to do.

3. Keep it simple and consistent. If you have more than four key performance indicators, or 10 or more conditions to determine credit allocation and payment release, then your plan is too complex and risks confusing your reps. By the same token, as lead-to-sales times invariably lengthen in 2009, try to keep the long-term mainstays of your plan consistent, to keep reps focused on selling, not calculating.

4. Keep it visible. Give the troops in the sales trenches real-time visibility into plans and compensation processes so they can see how they’re doing towards plan, and how much more they stand to make if they do “x,” “y” or “z.” Once you’ve automated, this kind of visibility via the Web becomes easy.

5. Keep it flexible. Plans should ultimately drive long-term behavior, but you want the flexibility to drive short-term activity as well. Make sure you can react to sudden opportunities and challenges through SPIFs and contests without altering the long-term framework of your plan.

6. Analyze. Knowledge is power. Automating compensation provides a bonanza of useful data on who bought what from whom and for what price and conditions. Leverage this data through analytics for insights into selling patterns, commission spend, plan effectiveness and how to further drive sales performance.

7. Measure constantly. In turbulent times, it helps to use all your senses all the time. Don’t wait until the end of 2009 to measure your plan’s effectiveness. There are bound to be numerous bumps and sudden shifts along the way that will impact your business. You need to stay on top of them with mid-year, quarterly and even monthly sales performance reality checks accompanied as necessary by fine-tunings of quotas, commissions, territories, etc.

While 2009 isn’t likely to yield blow-away financial results for all that many companies, there are key steps that can be taken to keep a business from being blown away altogether - and even to help it prosper in a challenging environment. More closely managing sales performance is one of those steps. Late, confusing, hard-to-manage or overly simplistic compensation plans are roadblocks to optimal sales performance, in both good years and bad.
Why wait for a good year to find out how much of a roadblock your plans have been?

Cloud Computing - A Silver Lining

Is it true that every cloud has a silver lining? What about cloud computing? I was reminded of the silver-lining adage recently when I noticed that several online news outlets had picked up this story from silicon.com – the thrust of which is that many companies still are not even aware of SaaS.

Sometimes we may lapse into thinking that we’re a bigger deal than we really are; and this forces us SaaS vendors to work that much harder to earn validation in the marketplace.

This article quotes statistics taken from a study conducted by BT (British Telecom), “One of the problems that we've unearthed in a survey that we did recently was about 81 per cent of customers we spoke to didn't really know about software as a service…”

This quote was from Chris Lindsay from BT, who goes on to say, "It's quite eye-opening really in terms of the lack of awareness but [also] the benefits are very clearly spelt out by the customers who have adopted the services…"

So the bad news is that 81% of companies (in the UK anyway) aren’t familiar with SaaS as a delivery model, but the good news is that, if they were familiar with it, they’d like it.

Unfortunately, several other online media outlets picked up this story and trumpeted it from the rooftops, using the somewhat sensational (and misleading) headlines such as, “Business Not Taking to SaaS”, “Businesses Still Clueless Over SaaS”, and “Businesses Still in the Dark About SaaS”.

What this tells me is that we – as an industry – still have a lot of work to do in order to get the word out on the SaaS delivery model in general. I think, too often, perhaps we forget that Silicon Valley doesn’t extend worldwide yet – in different parts of the world, the market penetration and mindshare that SaaS has claimed varies wildly depending on the geography you’re talking about.

Remember that the study in question was conducted in the UK, and there was some great news out of that region earlier this week, when TechWorld (billed as “The UK’s infrastructure and networking knowledge centre”) published this article that found a majority of companies planned “to adopt SaaS within five years.”

Neil Barton, director at Hostway, said: “Companies are certain that SaaS will make their application usage more c006Fst-effective because of the reduction in software management costs, and the ability to eliminate buying too many or too few software licenses.”

I agree with Jeff Kaplan of THINKstrategies who said, "I think (SaaS) adoption is far more advanced than is being readily reported.”

What SMBs are most concerned about is the functionality, Kaplan said. What they're finding is it's not just simpler and less expensive, it also adds a whole layer of application opportunity they couldn't get from legacy apps.

"A lot are having a revelation."

So perhaps that’s the silver lining to this particular cloud?

If not that, then perhaps the news yesterday that Symantec had agreed to buy MessageLab’s SaaS business unit for $695 million. Clearly, Symantec’s CEO John W. Thompson expects to make a major push into the SaaS market immediately. Reaction from industry media members was positive, as TheStreet.com and Forbes both published articles lauding the acquisition – one titled “Symantec Adds to Web-Software Arsenal”, and the other cleverly titled “Symantec Has Its Head in the Cloud”.

I think we’ve only seen the beginning of large companies looking to strategically make inroads into the SaaS/cloud-computing market. It makes too much sense to ignore, especially in these trying times.





_

Da Vinci, Plate Tectonics and CapEx Budgets

Here in San Jose, where Xactly is headquartered, the Tech Museum of Innovation – located right down the street from us – recently unveiled the world premiere of an exhibit titled ‘Leonardo: 500 Years into the Future’, billed as “the largest, most comprehensive exhibit of the innovative art, science and engineering works of Leonardo da Vinci” and “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see how this genius of the Renaissance has influenced and inspired much of the technology we use today.”

Now, I already knew some things about da Vinci and his life, but I learned that in addition to being one of the greatest painters and sculptors of all-time, his ideas about improving the world around him were simply astounding. In a time when no real technology existed, da Vinci “conceptualized a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.” [source]

He did all this five hundred years ago! I think it’s clear that the assertion made about da Vinci that he was perhaps ‘the most diversely talented person who ever lived’ is unequivocally correct.

Why am I telling you all of this (apart from the fact that it’s fascinating, and I seek to enlighten and instruct)?

Well, I was going to open this blog post by saying that we’re living in uncertain economic times.

But I stopped and realized that that’s an understatement on the same sort of level as saying “Leonardo da Vinci was slightly ahead of his time, don’t you think? If he was alive today, I’ll bet he'd be smart enough to have his own cable-access show, or maybe get a job selling Christmas trees at Home Depot. Possibly.”

It doesn’t quite capture it – and the economic crisis we’re facing can’t be understated. So it got me thinking about the need for companies to cut spending and save money on upfront costs; budgets are being slashed all over the place. But in most cases, companies don’t have the option to stop buying solutions altogether, they just must make smarter decisions about how they spend their money.

Opting for a SaaS solution in order to save their capital-expense budgets makes a lot of sense for these companies. As the always-eloquent and erudite Phil Wainewright points out in his blog, this financial crisis should be an opportunity for SaaS companies to continue to grow.

Phil says in his latest post, “If credit remains tight, then one of the first things businesses are going to cut is capital expenditure — either because they can’t stomach the risk, or because they can’t raise the finance. The upside for SaaS vendors is that those cash-strapped businesses will find the pay-as-you-go SaaS model highly appealing — especially if it helps deliver operational cost savings at the same time. So while the credit crunch seems certain to harm the front-loaded cost model of conventional software sales, SaaS should continue to grow by picking up some of those canceled projects.”

Sing it, Phil. We are in lock-step with you on this kind of thinking.

Additionally, when one considers that among the hardest-hit entities at the moment are the banks and financial institutions, I enjoyed this article (published by AmericanBanker.com) that touts the advantages of SaaS and BPO as an effective way to cut costs in the current economic climate.

To quote the article, opting for outsourcing some processes and choosing Software-as-a-Service solutions “not only reduces the bank's operating expenses and protects them from cost spikes… it can also help institutions reduce their risk through service level agreements. This allows executives to focus their attention and resources on critical areas like customer experience and new product strategy to stay competitive and grow their businesses.”

Banks, as we all know, are not early adopters when it comes to technology. They are forced to remain fairly conservative and are not prone to making broad sweeping changes in the way they run their business. I like the idea that we can help them navigate through this choppy water, and help them look ahead into the future.

Maybe not 500 years ahead like Leonardo… but we’re working on it.




_

CIOs are a Smart Bunch

In talking to CIOs these days, I’m hearing a lot of commonalities when it comes to discussing their focus and priorities.

One of these common threads is the need to opt for on-demand solutions over traditional on-premise software options because of man-power constraints. It seems there simply are not enough skilled folks to administer to these bulky on-premise software tools any longer.

Doing a little casting about on the internet, it seems as though I’ve hit upon something that’s begun to pick up steam: CIO.com published this great article about that very same topic. To quote the author, Thomas Wailgum:

“…however, there is a bigger problem that on-premise software vendors face: The net effect of the skills shortage is pushing existing and potential customers to consider alternative software delivery models, AMR Research analyst Dana Stiffler contends.

‘I think what it really means long term is that people are really crying out for a different delivery model for enterprise software and business functionality,’ she says. ‘And it's my belief that combinations of SaaS and business process outsourcing (BPO) will eventually begin to emerge and make that gap be slightly less noticeable.’

I’ve been banging on the ease-of-use drum for awhile. Consistently, I’ve called attention to the lower cost of entry, lower TCO, instantaneous upgrades, plus the freedom and flexibility that come with a subscription-based service model, but now we must add: no need to hire specialized, expensive personnel to administer to the technology.

Those on-premise software vendors better think about founding some schools just to train qualified technicians for their applications!

Better yet, I don’t want to wake any of them up. Forget I said anything.



_

Are We Hearing the Death Rattle of On-Premise Software?

Lately, I’ve been somewhat bemused when I see a small subset of the SaaS buzz that is registering out on the fringes of the blogosphere.

There seems to be an undercurrent of negative sentiment toward the on-demand world these days, and while I’m bemused, I’m not surprised.

I don’t want to confer validation on any of these ridiculous statements by calling them out specifically – though Jeff Kaplan (founder of THINKstrategies) does a very nice job of echoing some of my sentiments in this insightful article that was recently published on SeekingAlpha.

You’ve got people predicting the imminent demise of the SaaS market. Some folks would describe a prediction like that as ‘fuzzy thinking’ – and they’re half right; it’s fuzzy, but it’s not thinking.

The SaaS market is expanding like a balloon at the moment, which is why analysts are quoting growth rates of more than 100% in the next two years.

There are other recent examples of people attempting to throw water on the SaaS flame, but in my mind this fire will not be quelled – in fact, we’re not far from it becoming a raging inferno. However, this hasn’t stopped the haters from hating.

Is this not the *definition* of a ‘disruptive technology’? “…a technological innovation, product, or service that uses a "disruptive" strategy…to overturn the existing dominant technologies or status quo products in a market.”

HOW LOW-END DISRUPTION OCCURS OVER TIME (source: Wikipedia)

That’s what we’re seeing at the moment, I think – the ‘status quo’ vendors in the software space have become roused from their slumber and are reacting angrily to this challenge to their supremacy. So let’s call it what it is: the Death Rattle of the on-premise software world.

"If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel
cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business."

--Henry David Thoreau, ’Walden’(1854)

Boundary Conditions

Someone very clever once wrote, “Human beings are naturally drawn to ‘boundary conditions’ “ – for example, where land meets water, where the earth touches the sky, where space meets time.

In other words, we like to congregate at these boundary conditions; stand on the edge of something and gaze over at something else.

Is that why beach houses are so expensive?

I feel as though the SaaS market is at one of these boundary conditions right now. As we see more and more companies choose on-demand solutions, the ‘old way’ of doing things is giving way to the ‘new way’ of doing them.

It’s not hard to see why this is so: when one considers the lower cost of entry, lower TCO, instantaneous upgrades, plus the freedom and flexibility that come with a subscription-based service model, the exploding popularity of SaaS makes perfect sense.

Evidence of the ‘SaaS explosion’ can be found all over the place. Recently, Penny Crossman wrote a terrific article describing the “almost-meteoric rise of SaaS on Wall Street”.

On the same day last week, Salesforce.com announced not only the acquisition of InStranet (to strengthen its service and support offerings), but also record earnings for their second quarter.

The SaaS market is spectacularly healthy and growing at a dizzying pace. According to IDC’s Worldwide Software On-Demand Forecast 2007-2011 the CAGR is forecast 32% among companies of all sizes, and another analyst (that I'm not able to mention by name) estimates that Software-as-a-Service will grow to a $19.3 billion industry by 2011. This means that SaaS – already a healthy $6 billion industry in 2006, will have more than tripled in size in less than five years.

If we, as an industry, have not already reached our tipping point, it seems to be rapidly approaching.

Won’t you join me at this boundary condition? Let’s gaze over at the old, on-premise world and be glad that we’ve claimed such a valuable piece of beachfront real estate.

SaaS - Not 'Xactly' a Risky Proposition

Recently, I flew to visit a potential customer – this prospect happens to be a good-sized bank, and as is often the case with financial institutions they are extremely cautious about everything having to do with risk and security.

As a matter of fact, an executive in attendance made a point of asking me if there are risks inherent in the SaaS architecture.

“It seems like one of the main advantages of your model is that it’s extremely low-risk; the initial investment is very small. Am I missing something, some catch?” he asked me.

I pointed out that, on the contrary, he had it right from the beginning – the real risk would come from getting locked into a long-term commitment to an on-premise vendor and having to do so *before* you know for sure if their solution will work the way you need it to (and the way THEY say it will).

A true SaaS solution gives the customer the ultimate amount of freedom and flexibility; companies have embraced the idea of a ‘try-n-buy’ – instituting a pilot program that allows the customer to dip its toe into the water before deciding if they want to get wet.

This freedom enjoyed by the customer forces us SaaS vendors to be nimble and requires us to focus relentlessly on customer service. However, it also comes with a built-in competitive advantage: customers can find budget for these projects so much more easily than with an on-premise solution.

Phil Wainewright, who writes a terrific blog for ZDNet, wrote the following in a recent post of his: “Certainly, the low-risk, pay-as-you-go model will give SaaS vendors a big competitive advantage if capex budgets are slashed…”

The title of that post is, “Eight reasons SaaS will surge in 2008”, and Wainewright goes on to quote Microsoft SaaS architecture expert Gianpaolo Carraro who compares the current SaaS revolution to the awakening companies had in the mid-90s around using an Intra-net as well as the Internet.

I like that word: “awakening”. That’s definitely what this feels like – companies are waking up to the possibilities in the SaaS world. I can almost smell the morning coffee brewing.

Business Intelligence Network (podcast) - Automate Sales Performance Management as Software as a Service

Karen Steele discusses Xactly's ability to automate sales performance management as software as a service.

Listen to the podcast here.

Webinar Recording Available: The Business Case for On-Demand Sales Performance Management Analytics

CRM applications have revolutionized the selling process, organizing pre-sales data that reps and management need to manage the sales pipeline. But what about “post-sales” data? There is a ton of information produced at the time of sale that is effectively orphaned—information on what a customer actually bought, the final price, the commission paid, the territory where it was sold, etc. This is data that, if collected and cleansed, can be used to increase sales performance and maximize profits going forward.


In this Webinar, Xactly’s Karen Steele and THINKStrategies’ Jeff Kaplan will discuss how post-sales analytics can provide new and strategic insight into an organization’s selling patterns, commission spend, product performance, sales rep and team performance, and sales plan effectiveness. They will examine how post-sales data—traditionally scattered across a variety of disparate systems including ERP, HR, and Payroll—can be now be integrated and analyzed with an eye towards enhancing business strategies, changing sales rep behaviors, and super-charging sales organizations.

View Webinar

Upcoming Webinar: The Business Case for On-Demand Sales Performance Management Analytics

The Business Case for On-Demand Sales Performance Management Analytics with Xactly and THINKStrategies

Tuesday, July 29, 2008 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT

Register to learn more:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/415893690

CRM applications have revolutionized the selling process, organizing pre-sales data that reps and management need to manage the sales pipeline. But what about “post-sales” data? There is a ton of information produced at the time of sale that is effectively orphaned—information on what a customer actually bought, the final price, the commission paid, the territory where it was sold, etc. This is data that, if collected and cleansed, can be used to increase sales performance and maximize profits going forward.

In this Webinar, Xactly’s Karen Steele and THINKStrategies’ Jeff Kaplan will discuss how post-sales analytics can provide new and strategic insight into an organization’s selling patterns, commission spend, product performance, sales rep and team performance, and sales plan effectiveness. They will examine how post-sales data—traditionally scattered across a variety of disparate systems including ERP, HR, and Payroll—can be now be integrated and analyzed with an eye towards enhancing business strategies, changing sales rep behaviors, and super-charging sales organizations.

Participants will take away:

• Best practices for integrating and analyzing post-sales data to optimize sales performance.
• An understanding of how post-sales data can be leveraged daily by reps within their CRM applications to maximize profits – for the company and for themselves.
• A view of the broad scope of business processes that benefit from post-sales analytics – from sales compensation management to territory and quota management to pricing management and sales forecasting/planning.

Speakers:

Karen Steele, Vice President of Marketing, Xactly Corporation
Karen Steele is responsible for managing all aspects of Xactly's worldwide marketing.

Jeff Kaplan, Managing Director, THINKstrategies
Jeff Kaplan is the founder and managing director of THINKstrategies (www.thinkstrategies.com), a strategic consulting firm that helps IT enterprise decision-makers with their sourcing strategies; solution providers with their marketing strategies; and venture firms with their investment strategies.

Register to learn more:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/415893690

Podcast - Common SaaS Misconceptions

Everyone says different things about SaaS, with disagreements going down to the basic definition of what qualifies software as a service. Christopher Cabrera recently spoke with Krissi Danielsson at ebizQ about common SaaS misconceptions. Listen to the podcast below, or read the transcript.

Download file

Customers Take the Wheel

It’s no secret there’s a sea change occurring in enterprise software, as “on-premise” increasingly gives way to “on-demand.” What’s not so evident yet is the shift in power from the vendor to the customer that is occurring as a result of the on-demand revolution. In a recent article posted on ebizQ, I discuss how the growing popularity of on-demand SaaS applications will lead to a more customer-centric and responsive software industry. This is because in the on-demand world, the customer is firmly in the driver’s seat and can pull the plug on the vendor at any time. As opposed to on-premise software implementations, on-demand implementations have no expensive infrastructures and no sunk costs that lock customers in and limit their flexibility to make a change.

Nevertheless, customers need to step warily. As more and more large enterprise software companies test out the SaaS waters with initial on-demand offerings, there’s no guarantee they will support their on-demand customers properly. After decades of locking customers into expensive on-premise software and subjecting them to lengthy implementation cycles and costly upgrades, who’s to say these companies can suddenly and successfully shift gears and become paragons of customer care?

Then there are those vendors who are trying to cash in on the on-demand cachet by offering “hosted on-demand” applications that are really just the same old on-premise applications running remotely, and which have few of the advantages of a genuine on-demand application built on a multi-tenant SaaS model. There are some rude shocks just around the corner for the customers of these guys, who by blurring the truth are setting themselves up to disappoint their clientele.

So as you slide into the driver’s seat and take the wheel in the brave new on-demand world, how do you make sure you’re not going to be fooled and are indeed going to get all the value that you expect? In the ebizQ article, I posit a brief checklist to help customers navigate the maze of on-demand claims and promises. Like any good driver, you’ll want to run down such a list before turning the key. Check out the full article here, and let me know what you think: www.ebizq.net/topics/bpm/features/8567.html

Buyer Beware: “Hosted On-Demand” Is No More Than a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Reeling from tight IT budgets and the consequent popularity of new software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, many enterprise software vendors are casting around for ways to dress up their own offerings and perhaps cash in on the cachet of SaaS and on-demand delivery. What several have come up with is the “hosted on-demand” label, which in reality is nothing more than draping the tired old enterprise software wolf in ill-fitting sheep’s clothing. As I’ve said before, enterprise software by any name, hosted or otherwise, is not a substitute for true on-demand. Software vendors taking this re-labeling route are doing a colossal disservice to customers, whether those customers buy into the name game or not.

So, what does “hosted on-demand” have to offer? Disappointments, mostly. What these vendors are doing is simply providing the same old premise-based software in a hosted environment, coupled with a seemingly substantial—but not nearly substantial enough—price break. And under the fleece is the same old ravening wolf. Hosted or not, these are still expensive solutions to implement, and shaving 30 percent or even 40 percent off the typically enormous up-front implementation cost doesn’t change that fact—and there’s still the monthly fees for accessing the hosted software to contend with. These are also typically complicated and inflexible solutions and just because they are now off-premise doesn’t necessarily change that fact.

What may well change, however, is a customer’s support priority. With two models to support—on-premise and hosted—there’s an almost invariable dilution of resources. Which customers do you think a traditional enterprise software company is most likely to make its top priority? And for that matter, what about new functionality, version control, reliability and scalability? On-premise and “hosted on-demand” implementations are identical in that each customer is a discrete box, or technology platform—it’s just that in a hosted implementation, that box has been moved off-site. But with a true on-demand solution, all customers share the exact-same platform. Just as they all share the same low cost-base, they all benefit equally from more rapid introduction of new functionality as well as from identically robust version control, data security, disaster recovery and scalability. In numbers, there is strength.

So buyer beware. Don’t be misled by labels. If you want on-demand, go with pure on-demand solutions, 100 percent purpose built to deliver the full benefits of SaaS. Avoid the nasty shock of being fleeced, and let the wolves go howl.

SaaS IPO Tipping Point?

Could the NetSuite IPO be the beacon for a sea of change between Software as a Service companies and Wall Street? Are the days of trepidation for the SaaS business model, security and viability waning?

As I watch the revenue and sheer number of customers for on-demand companies like Salary.com, DemandTec and NetSuite amass—I say yes. All three companies are demonstrating to the market the benefits of this efficient and cost-effective model and calling Wall Street to attention.

Sure, a lot of companies are founded on a pure SaaS model, but relatively few have reached the public markets successfully. Why is this? It’s because many people are still struggling to understand the SaaS model and failing to truly grasp the fundamental differences between SaaS-based and on-premise software offerings. Investors can't look at SaaS companies through the same lenses they have used for years with traditional enterprise software companies. When I talk to investors, I tell them to focus on two main differences: customer renewal and the revenue dynamic.

First, recognize that SaaS companies are built from the ground up around customer satisfaction and customer renewal. To survive, they must earn the customer’s complete satisfaction every year, and often, every month. This focus is very different from traditional software companies whose first priority is to get to the next million dollar license deal in order to keep Wall Street happy, and whose second priority is to have these customers pay expensive ongoing maintenance and upgrade fees.

The second major difference: because there is no million dollar license fee, the revenue trails traditional software companies. This is actually great for investors because revenue SaaS companies earn is not an artifact from a relatively few very large deals, it comes from hundreds and hundreds of happy customers. This revenue dynamic is also the reason SaaS companies are so attractive and so much more predictable to Wall Street.

Because of the business model differences, it takes a little longer for SaaS vendors to ramp to the revenues that will justify an IPO, but—have no doubt—they are getting there fast. Salary.com, DemandTec and Netsuite are proving that it can be done and are helping to move the SaaS IPO market forward.

From a customer perspective, why SaaS and why now? SaaS offers customers an undisputable value and time to market advantage over traditional enterprise models, including no hardware, no maintenance fees, minimal implementation fees and, most importantly, no software upgrades. This means new features are available to customers instantaneously, as soon as they are live, saving customers from expensive upgrade costs while ensuring they’ll never trail behind on older releases of software.

SaaS is also breathing new life into technologies that were too expensive for the masses in a traditional enterprise model. The fast growing Sales Performance Management market is living proof. Founded on a pure on-demand or SaaS model, Xactly Corporation has quickly amassed more than 70 customers including Salesforce.com, CNet and Polycom—all of whom are now utilizing an on-demand Sales Performance Management platform to create a strategic competitive advantage within their businesses.

For companies like Xactly and investors in the market, the SaaS IPO tipping point may very well be here, and I think it’s about time.

Twin Drivers of Sales Performance: CRM and Sales Compensation Management

Xactly was talking to the CFO at a large financial services company last week who felt that sales and finance were too often disconnected from each other. Consequently, he is working with the vice president of sales to identify a tag-team of cornerstone sales performance management applications: one to capture data leading up to client transactions, the other to record all that happens after the fact. “Pre-sales and post-sales data are two sides of the same coin,” said the CFO.

We’ve talked before in this space about the value of centralizing post-sales data in an on-demand sales compensation management system. Sales and finance executives know that smart decisions are made when key business data is available in a centralized and secure environment.

Likewise, on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) systems are a natural home for pre-sales data. Together, on-demand sales compensation management and on-demand CRM are the twin pillars of sales performance management, an emerging category of software that market research firm Ventana Research estimates will reach $13.5 billion by 2010.

Ventana Research CEO and executive vice president of research Mark Smith has said: "Sales compensation management, under the umbrella of sales performance management, has stepped to the forefront in many organizations. Customers recognize that automating and integrating the business processes between sales and finance can have a significant impact on sales productivity, motivation and efficiency while increasing revenues and profits."

This brings us back to the story of the financial services CFO, a sub-plot of which was his insistence that his on-demand CRM and on-demand sales compensation management applications work together seamlessly to effect this business process integration and help drive optimal sales performance. Xactly gets this. Recently, we announced a partnership with Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand, and Xactly is already tightly integrated with on-demand CRM solutions from salesforce.com and RightNow Technologies. Significantly, salesforce.com and RightNow Technologies are also Xactly customers.

These deals speak volumes about Xactly’s commitment to delivering a complete solution to customers. They also say a lot about which on-demand sales compensation management solution the on-demand CRM leaders believe is the best. Unlike its competitors, Xactly is intent on helping companies protect and extend the value of their CRM investments. And on-demand CRM vendors are placing their bets and checkbooks accordingly.

Why SAS 70 Certification Matters at Both the Data Center and the Application

Automating key business processes may not be the first thing companies are thinking of when evaluating their compliance initiatives, but certainly the two go hand-in-hand. According to a recent study by AMR Research, 42 percent of respondents reported that streamlining business processes is a primary benefit of good governance, risk management and compliance practices.

Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legislation has forced companies to implement greater internal controls. Given the importance of this issue, shouldn’t technology vendors be required to deliver solutions that meet the highest professional standards for ensuring internal controls?

Xactly thinks so. We have had Type II SAS 70 certification at our data center for some time and have extended this leadership position when we announced this week that Xactly Incent successfully completed a Type I SAS 70 audit. By way of this achievement, Xactly Incent is the first independently validated SAS 70 on-demand sales compensation management application hosted in a SAS 70 Type II certified facility underscoring Xactly’s commitment to providing customers maximum assurances with regard to compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations and concerns over outsourced controls. SAS 70 refers to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants Statement on Auditing Standard (SAS) No. 70 that defines the standards used by an auditor to assess the internal controls of a service organization.

But what’s important is not that Xactly is the only on-demand sales compensation management company that can claim its application and hosting facility are both SAS 70 certified. The critical point is that now companies can get automation and security without paying exorbitant enterprise software prices. The long-standing enterprise software company criticism that on-demand solutions are not secure is no longer viable.

Simply put, SOX is too important to be taken lightly. Companies can hold vendors accountable by engaging only those whose applications and hosting facilities have been certified SAS 70 compliant.

Once again, Xactly has raised the bar by putting in place the most rigorous controls.

Post-Sales Data at the Center of the Ultimate Sales Performance Management Experience

Delivering a world-class customer experience is a goal for any forward-looking organization. In Xactly’s case, the focus is on providing customers with the ultimate sales performance management experience, a result we can deliver by providing companies the means to aggregate, cleanse, centralize and analyze post-sales data on-demand.

Last week Xactly announced its product roadmap for the next 18 months. The big picture is that over the coming months, Xactly will deliver the most comprehensive array of on-demand sales performance management solutions from a single vendor. Available now is Xactly Incent 3.2, a Web-based incentive compensation application that enables medium-size enterprises in any industry to improve sales effectiveness and maximize profits. A new, complementary module for Xactly Incent, Xactly Modeling™, empowers finance and sales to determine the impact of commissions expense forecast, organization plan and compensation plan changes in advance of implementing them. And to provide greater options for seamless connectivity, we have made available an open set of APIs called Xactly Connect™. These recent additions round out the Xactly product family including Xactly Data Management™ and Xactly Analytics™ announced last year. And coming soon is Xactly Rewards™, a non-cash incentive capability to augment your cash incentive programs as well as Xactly Territory ™, Xactly Quota ™, Xactly Forecast/Planning ™ and Xactly Price Management™.

But the meat of the news from Xactly last week addresses the critical need companies have to automate sales and finance business processes in and around sales performance management, and to create an on-demand repository for this data that is centralized, secure and hosted.

Fortunately for customers, Xactly gets this. Xactly’s vision is to help companies leverage this business data to automate mission critical business processes that comprise sales performance management to help companies improve operational performance and maximize profits. By aggregating data from a variety of disparate systems and feeding it to the Xactly Incent sales compensation management application, customers gain a one-stop shop for all sales performance-related data. Coupled with the Xactly Analytics module, customers can slice-and-dice data to determine what products were sold, to whom, through which channels, and at what price. The result is the most accurate reflection of what’s going on in the field a company can have. Let’s take a look at an example: Imagine that you are a hardware vendor and you have just sold a million dollar deal to IBM. IBM is located on the East coast, so it is booked on the East, but it was the West coast team that closed the deal. The process of calculating compensation takes into account all of these dynamics and scrubs the data so you have the clearest possible picture of what was sold in which geography, transaction by transaction. This means that after the compensation process, you truly have the richest and most accurate data in your company.

At the center of any company’s sales performance management strategy is the business data which includes what products have been sold to whom, through which channels, in which geographies and at what price points. Xactly Corporation is uniquely suited to automate several key business processes for finance and sales that leverage this business data including quota and territory management, price management and forecast/planning in addition to the capabilities it offers today

In the above diagram, the inner circle illustrates Xactly's core focus for delivering on-demand sales performance management, while the outer ring represents Xactly's ecosystem of partner strategies whose solutions are synergistic to Xactly Incent. Through such strategies, Xactly is able to provide greater value to customers and partners.

The complete line of Xactly sales performance management solutions have all the rich features you’d expect, and then some. We know customers require greater automation of business processes that enable sales and finance to increase productivity and profits. Our holistic approach is focused on helping companies significantly improve performance by optimizing the effectiveness of selling channels, impacting a business’s bottom-line, and managing risk and compliance.

We also get that customers aren’t interested in patching together point solutions from multiple vendors. Can you imagine buying your car’s engine from one dealer, the frame from another, wheels from a third, and so on? Of course not. Going forward, customers can buy with confidence today knowing that Xactly will deliver the industry’s most comprehensive and integrated on-demand sales performance management suite.

Xactly remains the only sales compensation and sales performance management vendor to offer a 100 percent multi-tenant on-demand architecture, which ensures customers will experience a low total cost of ownership, seamless product upgrades and first-class security.

Customers are truly excited about these innovations. They want their business operations to hum, and Xactly, with its focus on providing a hosted, secure and centralized repository for post-sales data, is uniquely capable of making the ultimate sales performance management dream a reality and the experience world-class.

Get Connected, Or Else

In the news this week was a report of yet another business being investigated for back-dating stock options for executives. This company is not the first and surely won’t be the last to have the authenticity of its business data tested in a public forum. Each time it happens I am reminded of the importance of data accuracy and consistency, not to mention personal accountability.

In my experience, I’ve seen firsthand what happens when the various functional areas of a company are not on the same page. More than one product launch has been torpedoed because sales was selling a product that marketing had marketed but which was not quite completed according to the engineering team.

On a larger scale, businesses are sunk every day because members of the executive team are aware only of information from their particular business silos. Rather than being connected, data is treated as if it exists in a vacuum, removed from and not at all dependent upon data from other departments in the organization. Frequently, this issue leads to problems that effect a company’s balance sheet. Too often, the results are more serious, including jail time for certain individuals.

To avoid this, businesses need to take a close look at the process by which they share data across the organization. Take, for example, the critical issue of sales performance management. For many companies, there is no greater need than to ensure sales is meeting its goals and objectives. But what happens when sales data is disconnected from finance, and vice versa?

Consider the consequences of this vignette: At an executive management meeting, the vice president of sales shares data regarding the number of deals the company closed in a given quarter. Everyone is excited because the sales team met its number. That is until the CFO lets it be known that the cost of providing commissions to the sales representatives, combined with the cost of the programs implemented by marketing to drive sales activity, is greater than the total revenue created by the sale of the products. If sales, marketing and finance had been on the same page with respect to each group’s numbers, this situation could easily have been avoided.

The goal of sales performance management applications, like Xactly Incent, is to centralize key sales-related data in a common repository. When all data is in a common location, data analysis and reporting is easier and more effective. Until recently, there was no easy way to connect “islands of information” for sales performance management purposes. But that has changed with the availability of Xactly Connect, the world’s first on-demand incentive compensation management integration platform that connects any system to Xactly web services APIs, resulting in transparent integration to the user.

The point of the story is, when one business hand knows what the other is doing, the chances of success are much greater. Every employee, across departments, as well as business partners, can participate in a seamless business process that puts information in the hands of people when they need it most. The challenge is getting on the same page; the answer is to get connected.

Modeling Requirements: What to Look for and Why

Compensation modeling is an important component of the sales compensation profession, affecting everyone in the industry, from individual sales persons to CFOs. There are many schools of thought as to how to approach this problem. Historically, automated solutions have only provided a point solution for one aspect of the modeling challenge. Until today. Xactly Modeling provides a fully integrated and fully functional modeling environment to leverage all critical requirements for the finance and sales professionals.

What We Have Learned

Leveraging our extensive domain expertise, Xactly has identified several key capabilities to effectively automate sales compensation management modeling. These should be considered as requirements in any evaluation of an sales compensation management vendor. Any vendor not able to adequately support the requirements below will not be able to meet all of the day-to-day scenarios needed to safely test, validate, and promote your business strategies into daily practice.

• Plan Modeling
  
  • Micro level (per payee)
    
  • Macro level (for organization or channel)
• Forecast Expense Modeling
• Organizational Modeling
• Bi-directional Support
• Separate Sandboxes for Production and ModelingSaaS Multi-tenant Provider

What to Look for and Why

Requirement 1: Plan Modeling
This requirement stipulates that users be able to create or modify any plan element for modeling purposes. This includes the ability to create a full plan from scratch or model individual elements such as rates, quotas, SPIFs, and more. Actual production plans and ‘proposed’ plans should be supported. Plan changes impact compensation in a non-linear fashion. This is where all vendors have traditionally focused although not all vendors support both micro and macro modeling.

Ask These Questions:

• Does the vendor support easy manipulation of plan elements to model the needed compensation design?
• Do they support micro modeling? Per payee?
• Do they support macro modeling? Full organization reviewable in total?

Xactly can.

Requirement 2: Forecast Expense Modeling
This requirement stipulates that both production data and forecast data are available to use as data sources to produce commission expense forecasts. Forecast data enables the user to produce modeled expense forecasts for future periods, which is supported by some vendors.

Ask These Questions:

• Can my actual data be easily made available for modeling while not impacting my production processing?
• Can modeling be run independent of and concurrent to production in case I need to perform a live calculation?
• Is modeled data separate from production data? (See Requirement 6 for impact.)

Xactly supports forecast expense modeling in all of these ways.

Requirement 3: Organizational Modeling
This requirement stipulates that a modeling solution must support any organizational structure, current or forecasted, for use in modeling scenarios. Organizational modeling is the most common requirement missed by sales compensation management vendors. You need organizational modeling to view historical data or forecasted data against actual or proposed deployment strategies. As new partner channels, products, or support overlays are needed, organizational modeling provides an accurate picture as to what you can expect. Organizational changes impact compensation in a non-linear fashion.

If a vendor does not support full organizational modeling, they cannot support all of your daily needs for designing a successful strategy.

Organizational modeling allows you to:

• Use actual payees
• Test results against your actual organization
• Simultaneously test results against a new organization with:
  
  • Modified positions
    
  • Additional headcount
    
  • Reduced headcount
    
  • New team assignmentsAltered overlay or support assignments

Ask This Question:
Does the vendor support full organizational modeling for each point above?

Xactly supports organization modeling—fully.

Requirement 4: Separate Sandbox Environments
This requirement stipulates that the production environment must not be co-mingled with the modeling environment. The Xactly leadership learned over our tenure in the sales compensation management space that customers with only one production environment are reluctant to “play” with creative rule designs due to a fear of impacting actual results. This prevents the customers from being fully self-sufficient. Our sandbox approach means that you can experiment with the application as much as you want and not worry about deleting, changing or damaging anything. If by some chance you do, you have a secure source from which to restore your model back to any state. Our sandbox approach is the best way you can be fully confident in using an application; you can use it any way you want, every day, and not worry about making a mistake. You can’t do this if your modeling is co-mingled with your production environment.

A separate sandbox approach promotes:

• User adoption
• Ongoing user training
• No performance impact on production
• No co-mingling of actual data with modeled data
• Secure promotion of modified plans
• Archiving of approved plans, promotions or organizationsUnique access for alternate users that are restricted from accessing the live environment

Ask This Question:
Can your sales compensation management vendor support each of the above-mentioned scenarios?

Xactly can.

Requirement 5: Bi-Directional Data Support
This requirement stipulates that the production data can be easily sourced to a secure modeling environment. This is not a simple copy-and-paste (See Requirement 4). Bi-directional data movement allows users to quickly deploy modeling scenarios and promote approved changes back into production in a secure manner.

Ask This Question:
Does the vendor’s data model support these criteria for modeling?

• Bi-directional data movement
  
  • Aggregated objects
    
  • Individual objects (single rule, etc.)
• Role security on data movement
• Intuitive user interface for any business user
• Protection from performance impact

Xactly can support all of these criteria.

Requirement 6: SaaS Multi-tenant Provider
This requirement is at the core of the Xactly design philosophy. The requirement states that in order to fully leverage the highest ROI and lowest TCO, a full multi-tenant SaaS provider is preferred.

Ask This Question:
Does your vendor support both multi-tenant database and multi-tenant application SaaS as a delivery model?

Xactly can.

Why Multi-Tenant On-Demand Software is Good for the Customer

I was driving to work the other day when a radio ad caused me to do a double-take. The product pitchman was pushing an HD radio service. Having just updated the televisions in my house, I know that “HD” is a term typically used to describe picture – not audio – quality. Sure enough, a quick Internet search clued me into the fact that HD radio stands for “hybrid digital” radio, which has nothing at all to do with high-definition television.

On the one hand, I give credit to the HD radio product vendor for its innovative marketing technique. Certainly there is logic to leveraging a hot industry acronym as a means to drawing-in customers. On the other hand, I wonder what impact the tactic has on customers, who are persuaded to buy based on a misleading and misbranded pitch.

The experience reminds me of the on-demand software model. Legacy software vendors everywhere are telling anyone who will listen about their new “on-demand” strategy. Clearly, the term means different things to different people. Unfortunately, only one definition of on-demand software – one that includes a multi-tenant architecture – returns the value that customers expect when they choose to go on-demand.

Legacy software vendors prey on customer confusion regarding on-demand software. Like the HD radio vendor, traditional software companies have a lot to gain by tying themselves to a hot industry catch-phrase such as on-demand. Rather than continue to debate this issue, I think it’s more valuable to address the questions I hear most frequently from customers: “Why do I care whether your application is on-demand?” and “Why is a multi-tenant architecture good for me?”

Believe it or not, the answers are surprisingly straightforward. Customers should care whether or not a software application is on-demand because what is good for me, the vendor, is ultimately good for you. If we can support a single line of code and maintain only a single version of the software, we can focus our engineering talent on bringing new functionality and improvements to you. If we employ a true multi-tenant architecture, we can deploy seamless upgrades on a large scale whether we have 100 customers or 10,000 customers.

By contrast, legacy software vendors whose “on-demand” applications are lacking a multi-tenant architecture simply can not offer the same value to a customer. Just imagine what happens when the vendor has to upgrade 10,000 customers, all with unique application schemas. How many engineers does the vendor have to employ to manage that process? What do you, the customer, have to give up since these staff resources can not work on new features and enhancements? It only gets worse when the vendor has to make a data schema change in a future release.

Clearly there is an important distinction between on-demand software that is multi-tenant and that which is not, just as there is a difference between HD radio and HD television. That’s why my guidance to customers is, ask a vendor before you buy whether or not they have a multi-tenant application architecture.

Creating SaaS Partner Ecosystems

Xactly Corporation and RightNow Technologies have more in common than a great name, but who are we to disagree to the smart folks at CRMchump.com. Much more than a marriage of convenience, Xactly and RightNow share a singular vision of the software landscape as it relates to the needs of mid-sized businesses. That is, customers win when like-minded software companies work together.

It is for this reason that Xactly is expending considerable resources to expand the scope of its partner program. Xactly is the most tightly integrated sales compensation management solution with salesforce.com and has set its sights on creating a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) partner ecosystem that enhances the value of customer investments in these solutions. For further information on Xactly partners and its Partner Program, visit the Partners section of the Xactly web site.

Xactly understands that customers are laser-focused on deploying on-demand solutions from adjacent and naturally synergistic application areas. That's why you see Xactly partnering with CRM vendors Oracle and RightNow in addition to salesforce.com. CRM and sales compensation management are two critical components of sales performance management and customers are insisting these solutions integrate seamlessly. Likewise, Xactly has partnered with on-demand talent management vendor SuccessFactors to unite the Xactly compensation management solution for sales staff with the SuccessFactors compensation system for the general employee population. Meanwhile, users of financial software appreciate Xactly's ability to interface with on-demand software leader Intacct, while other customers plan on leveraging Xactly's partnership with Expensewatch.com for expense management and Right90 for sales planning.

Establishing a SaaS partner ecosystem centered around sales performance management – Xactly's mission for its partner program - is not a cliché. Sales is the lifeblood of any company, and ensuring sales effectiveness is paramount to staying competitive. Unfortunately, business processes to automate sales performance management historically have been non-existent, broken, or islands of disconnected point solutions. Through its network of SaaS partner friends, Xactly intends to change all that.

Sales is the lifeblood of any company.

Why then have the business processes to automate sales – with the ultimate goal of increasing revenues and profits and improving sales productivity – historically been either non-existent, broken, or islands of disconnected point solutions? Shockingly, the answer lies in the fact that many companies historically have labored under the yoke of spreadsheets to manage the complexities of incentive sales compensation and sales performance. This archaic approach, fraught with errors and risk, is no longer acceptable or viable from either a sales or finance perspective. Additionally, spreadsheet-operated companies are finding themselves at a significant competitive disadvantage and risk of non-compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory standards.

During my previous selling career at an enterprise sales compensation management company, I was repeatedly forced to walk away from sales opportunities because mid-market companies simply could not afford the cost of an enterprise sales compensation management solution: large up-front software license fees, maintenance, hardware, and unpredictable implementation schedules.

That’s why I started Xactly Corporation, the leader in on-demand sales compensation management. Xactly is representative of a new breed of software companies who have chosen to pursue a 100% pure play, on-demand solution.

The biggest advantage of on-demand software might not be measured in terms of cost, but in terms of productivity. Enterprise systems are not only expensive, but they can take months – or even years – to install. That's simply not acceptable to today’s dynamic businesses that demand immediate results when they buy new software.

In contrast, on-demand software can usually be installed in a matter of days or weeks. That translates into less wasted time and energy - and the ability to focus on what really matters: customer satisfaction.

To be clear, I’m not signaling the death knell of enterprise software anytime soon. There will always be a place for enterprise software, but its primary customers will be large corporations that can afford to invest millions of dollars to deploy their systems. For mid-market companies that want the advantages of an enterprise system without needlessly sacrificing cash or productivity, the future is clearly on-demand.

But enough commentary from me. Please join me in voicing your opinion in On-Demand Compensation Management Blog.