Xactly Extend

Solve the problem of inefficient and cumbersome territory and quota planning (TQP) with Xactly Extend & SANDS Partners.

Context

The customer is an American leading software company based in New York that develops a SaaS customer experience management (CXM) platform.

With its innovative technology and robust capabilities, our customer caters to a diverse range of industries, including retail, telecommunications, financial services, healthcare, and more. Its clients range from small businesses to large multinational corporations, all seeking to enhance their customer engagement strategies and drive business growth.

They are known for its commitment to innovation and customer success, continually updating its platform to adapt to the evolving needs of the digital landscape. The company prides itself on providing exceptional customer support and consulting services, ensuring that clients maximize the value of their investment in software.

The client defined and prepared a database of potential leads who, given their characteristics, might be interested in their solution. They were able to collect more than 90,000 companies to which sales activities had to be undertaken, for which it was necessary to improve operations in the TQP area.

The company was looking for a solution to inefficient and cumbersome territory and quota planning (TQP) in order to effectively undertake sales efforts to a predefined group of more than 90,000 companies.

The problem was that there were too many of them relative to what they were able to accomplish in a year.

It was necessary to correctly assign salespeople to companies, given the potential effectiveness of sales efforts, by determining the scoring of leads, based on industry, past sales efforts, region, etc.

The client, due to the fact that he uses Salesforce and Xactly Incent on a daily basis, needed a solution and service provider that could both prepare process mapping and integrate data from different sources.

With SANDS Partners being the world’s first certified Xactly Extend partner, the client entrusted us to implement the system.

The client's biggest challenges

Territory and Quota Planning (TQP) process handled in Excel:
Managing territory and quota planning in Excel posed significant challenges due to manual processes, limited scalability, and increased risk of errors.

Mix of traditional sales and overlays/specialists:
The client’s sales model included a mix of traditional sales approaches along with overlays or specialists, resulting in unneeded complexity in territory and quota assignments.

Top-down discretionary quota setting process, requiring reconciliation with Account-driven Bottom-up approach:
The client employed a top-down quota setting process, which often clashed with the bottom-up approach driven by individual account insights, leading to inconsistencies and inefficiencies.

Current planning cycle takes 3+ months:
The existing territory and quota planning cycle spanned over three months, leading to delays in decision-making, missed opportunities, and reduced agility in response to market changes.

Solution

By deploying Xactly Extend, we tackled the complex challenges faced by our client in Territory and Quota Planning (TQP).

The manual processes inherent in their TQP workflows were cumbersome and error-prone, leading to inefficiencies and inconsistencies. With Xactly Extend, we automated these processes, eliminating manual intervention and establishing a centralized platform as the single source of truth for all global TQP activities. This not only significantly enhanced transparency and accuracy, but also operations, reducing the planning cycle time from over three months to a more agile timeframe.

One of the primary challenges our client encountered was the mix of traditional sales and overlays/specialists in their sales model. This complexity made territory and segment assignment a daunting task, often resulting in confusion and suboptimal resource allocation. Xactly Extend brought clarity and order to this process by leveraging advanced algorithms and analytics to optimize territory boundaries and ensure equitable distribution of resources based on sales potential and expertise.

Moreover, the client’s quota setting process was primarily discretionary, lacking the data-driven insights needed for accurate and achievable quotas. With Xactly Extend, we facilitated a shift towards a data-driven approach. By integrating comprehensive analytics and leveraging crucial customer data, we provided management with better insights for quota establishment. This ensured that quotas were not only accurate and achievable but also fair, fostering a more equitable distribution and incentivizing performance.

Furthermore, Xactly Extend maximized the integration of the client’s powerful tech stack, including customer’s platform. By integrating with existing data infrastructure and leveraging customer interaction data, Xactly Extend enhanced data accuracy, accessibility, and utilization. This integration facilitated a holistic view of customer interactions, enabling more informed decision-making and enhancing overall business performance.

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What our business partners say about us

Sands Partners have been instrumental for the expansion of the Xactly international business and helped the transition to the partner-first delivery model. They have proven to be a reliable partner and support our increasing delivery demand.

Sands’ customer centricity combined with their solid SPM expertise and excellent Xactly products knowledge help us provide amazing customer experience and achieve the best results for our customers

Chris Sloan

Senior Director Alliances EMEA & APAC

Sands Partners helped us with the implementation of our complex incentive models in XACTLY Incent and loading the system with Data from our CRM System Saleforce.com. We encoutered technical difficulties in this process which Sands consultants helped us to overcome with the result of a fully functional Incent System. The technical Staff was very skilled in implementing our requirements and the project was lead very well with a standardized procedure and documentation. We had a great project team spirit and the results speak for themselves.

Imo Jacobsen

Technical Project Lead

Sands Partners are made up of young highly motivated and technically gifted consultants which are supported by an experienced leadership team. Sands are always searching for ways to improve and deliver more value for their customers. Their efforts translates into truly tangible benefits for their customers, for example the recent investment in project management helps structure the team better, improves communication and allows the consultants to focus on delivery.

I have full trust in Sands Partners and I look forward to more successful deliver with them in 2023 and beyond

Matthew Cuthill

Director Digital Transformation – Finance

SANDS Partners consultants arrived at our headquarters for kick-off . My first impression was that they knew what they were talking about, they were very credible. They asked many searching questions about various components, and we delved into the details. It is reassuring to know that they were focused on the details and have experience in this field.

Philip van Heerden

Head of RevOps

CaptivateIQ has been expanding its partner network as the business continues to experience significant growth. One area of focus is extending our global reach to provide more high-quality service delivery options for our customers. The team at Sands Partners has over 15 years of domain expertise and is the premier partner for incentive compensation services in Eastern Europe.

Trevor Childers

Head of Enterprise Sales

Everyone from the SANDS Partners team was very supportive from the very beginning of the implementation project, including the fact that we wanted to accelerate the implementation cycle as much as we could. We wanted to get up and running as quickly as possible. The SANDS Partners team was great about starting the work quickly and they were very flexible even with some slowdowns from different sides. Also the team was pretty transparent, pretty open, and with a good level of communication about what was happening. They handled it the right way.

Ronak Dave

Financial and Sales Operations Manager

Demand for ZINKT products is growing fast, so it was important for us to find a key strategic service partner we can trust to provide best-in-class service in the EMEA markets.

When we work with our clients, we always take a holistic approach to projects, making sure we understand the upstream processes that affect payments accurately. The deep and extensive experience in the SANDS Partners team is unique both in the area of SPM and related upstream systems (such as Salesforce), which makes SANDS Partners an obvious partner for ZINKT.

What is the most important, our teams focus on the same fundamental goal – everything we do is to ensure our customers’ success.

Tom Swinbourne

Chief Executive Officer

Fastmarkets worked with Sands Partners to implement our new Xactly Incent instance with an integration into Salesforce. The team we worked with was very professional, made themselves available on short notice and helped shaping the system as we were intending it to be. Their flexibility and support were top class and it allowed us to roll out a working system within our tight timeframes. The collaboration was pleasant and efficient, I would highly recommend this team and company to implement medium to large scale incentive automation projects.

Hugo Robein

Divisional Head of Sales Operations

„We choose SANDS Partners to cooperate on a project related to the commission system for our sellers. We knew it is going to be a difficult project to manage and maintain within the short time frame. By establishing a strong relationship built on mutual trust, professionalism, competence, flexibility and common understanding of the goal, we achieved it. That is why we are issuing this certificate of professionalism, competence and flexibility to this excellent relationship that started over a year ago.

The most important lesson we learned during this project is that choosing a competent, flexible and trusted vendor is critical to the success of the project. SANDS Partners have proven their worth many times; they have always gone the extra mile when needed and continue to work closely with us to help us achieve the required results. They are still a highly competent and trusted supplier and made no small contribution to the success of the project ”.