Valuable Data, Valuable Insights

Xactly was trying to differentiate itself in the sales performance and incentive compensation management world. The employees knew the data they had collected on hundreds of companies would be valuable to their customer base, but they weren't sure just how.

"After 11 years of being one of the first cloud-based ICM services, we realized that the compensation management market was getting saturated. We needed something to make our company stand out," said Cole Connelly, product management lead.

Making sense of its mountain of data was one of Xactly's biggest challenges. "We had a lot of work to do to figure out how to normalize the data, how to aggregate it in a way that made sense, the right ways to break it down, and the right metrics to pull out that would be meaningful. For instance, we might want to look at salary, or span of control, or quota attainment differences between men and women. But to do that effectively, and to really build a story into something like an infographic, we needed a tool that was flexible and allowed us to easily set up and fine-tune work flows."

Becoming Industry Thought Leaders

With the help of TIBCO® Data Science, Xactly was able to convert the data it had collected over 13 years on compensation plans of more than 300,000 sales professionals into actionable information. TIBCO Data Science helped surface patterns in the data and support a well-known industry report on gender pay equality.

"We could not do a lot of the custom engagements that we do if it wasn't for the TIBCO Data Science tool. We also use TIBCO Data Science to generate a lot of thought leadership information. In terms of influence, the difference in using TIBCO Data Science is night and day."

Reputation as a Thought Leader

As a result of using TIBCO Data Science, customers turn to Xactly for thought leadership on gender pay equality. The company found that women perform better in sales overall, but their compensation is lower than males in the same role. TIBCO Data Science helped guide this story into an impactful one. This year, the team decided to do the same analysis on their own organization.

"After looking at our own data, we changed the pay structure for several employees. Some of them were being underpaid. That was a big internal impact that TIBCO Data Science had."

Faster and Easier Product Changes

Xactly used TIBCO Data Science to also put data in the hands of experts who understand business problems so they could easily and quickly propose product changes. The information provided also helped non-experts build infographics/conclusions from unusually complex datasets, which enabled faster time to market for products and fostered relationships with other industry leaders.

Strategic Vision and Leading Partnerships

"Some of the biggest advantages that we probably would not have been able to attain without TIBCO lie in being able to partner with some of the biggest companies in the sales compensation space, like CEB, Gartner, MHI, and Sales Globe. We've done joint projects, providing our data in a custom output to a consultancy that uses it to drive knowledge through their customer group.

"TIBCO has also been a tremendous help with our strategic services organization, the part of our business that's focused on consulting, helping customers build their incentive plans and understand what's going on in their industry. We're empowered to help them with all kinds of engagements and provide them with the data they need to feel confident about the programs we're suggesting."