Acision Fuels Rapid Growth, Strengthens Strategic Sales Focus with Xactly Incent

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“With compensation plans that keep improving, new opportunities appearing, and strategic priorities that continually evolve, Xactly Incent gives us control over what’s going on. In an ever-changing world, Xactly Incent is a point of sanity.”

- Hugh Palmer, Director of Sales Information Systems, Acision

Headquartered in the UK, Acision is the world's leading messaging company, providing communication solutions for over 300 network operators and service providers globally, and serving more than 1.5 billion consumers in 135 countries across six continents. Delivering more than half of the world's SMS revenues, rapidly growing Acision even enables the popular TV show “American Idol” to interact with a record-breaking 100 million voters.

Challenge
When Acision became an independent company in 2007, change became management’s constant companion. Spun off from parent-company LogicaCMG and separated from the company’s familiar IT systems, the $250 million “startup” began to forge new paths. This included looking at economical and flexible Software-as-Service (SaaS) applications, and exploring ways to keep sales efforts aligned with corporate strategies and in synch with the dynamics of the marketplace and the economy.

“Our challenge has been to do more with less: keeping staff the same size while growing our sales numbers,” says Hugh Palmer, director of sales information systems, Acision. “With this in mind, we took a hard look at our sales compensation plans, looking to streamline and improve the flexibility and control over their management, while ensuring they would continuously drive desired sales behaviors.”

To this end, Acision engaged a compensation consultancy to devise more sophisticated sales plans and make sure all sales people around the world were on the right plans. But when the finance group said it would take months to get the new plans implemented and tested within spreadsheets and new in-house tools, Acision turned to the Xactly Incent on-demand sales compensation management solution.

Solution
“We had previously seen a demo of Xactly Incent’s capabilities, and realized this was the perfect opportunity to go with an automated, on-demand platform for compensation management,” says Palmer. “We’d previously used spreadsheets to calculate commissions and keep track of plans, as well as paper-based goal sheets in which sales staff manually signed off on their plans. Every step of this process was fraught with problems. Xactly Incent offered us a rapid, cost-effective and lasting way forward.”

Among the features that attracted Acision to Xactly Incent was its ability to handle multiple currencies, as the company processes orders globally in more than 10 different currencies and also pays commissions in several currencies. Xactly Incent could also help accurately calculate commissions to eliminate the errors and resulting disputes that invariably occurred when relying on manual, spreadsheet-based methods.

Also important was the ability of Xactly Incent to integrate closely with Salesforce CRM, which Acision implemented around the same time. By logging into Xactly Incent directly from their Salesforce CRM application, Acision sales staff enjoy single sign-on capabilities to quickly see where they stand in regards to commission plans and attainment. Monthly reports, such as sales performance vis a vis quota, are also produced by Xactly Incent and exported into Salesforce CRM.

But an overarching advantage has been having a single, strategic, centralized system for everything from plan creation and implementation, to electronic plan sign-ups and archiving, to managing plan change. Within one year of deploying Xactly Incent, Acision made two major changes to its sales compensation strategies to adjust to market dynamics – and implemented those changes quickly and successfully across its global sales team through Xactly Incent.

“We have compensation plans that keep improving, opportunities that keep appearing, and strategic priorities that keep evolving – and Xactly Incent gives us control over what’s going on,” says Palmer. “In an ever-changing world, Xactly Incent is a point of sanity.”

Business Benefits

More strategic sales behaviors
Acision’s annual run rate has doubled to $500 million since it has become an independent company. Xactly Incent is credited with helping to align sales efforts with corporate revenue goals. “It’s definitely driving strategic behaviors,” claims Palmer. “Our new plans focus on bookings, revenue and cash, and sales staff are being incentivized to do what the company wants.”

Xactly’s patented Incentive Estimator enables sales staff to identify the sales opportunities and deal structures that will yield maximum commissions payouts. Looking ahead, Acision plans to allow sales staff to leverage this function from within Salesforce CRM, encouraging sales staff to close certain deals rather than others based on a combination of Xactly’s real-time incentive calculations and “live” Salesforce CRM opportunity data.

Anytime global sales visibility
Operating across different time zones and cultures, Acision finds Xactly Incent’s real-time, web-based visibility into plans and attainment to be a valuable common tool across the field force and its management. “Sales staff can now go online from anywhere and see precisely what’s going on, spotting commissions issues immediately, such as ‘Are the orders I expected to see actually in the system?’ and ‘Are the splits correct?’,” explains Palmer. “This has been a big advantage in reducing disputes and enabling sales staff to focus more on selling. This also holds true for management, who can go in at any time and see how people are performing against plan, and subsequently perhaps shake a few bodies.”

Electronic plan distribution and approval
Previously, when paper-based processes were in effect at Acision, getting signatures on goal sheets was a time-consuming task. Now, using Xactly’s Document Management feature, new compensation plans and plan revisions are sent out electronically for an individual’s electronic signature. “Where we once had transcription errors, dawdling and even deliberate changes, we now have a rigorous, centrally controlled system for securing and archiving plan approvals. This has been amazingly useful in terms of internal controls, compliance and speed of plan implementation. Put simply, unless you sign your plan in Xactly Incent, you don’t get your commission.”

Easy adaptability to change
Agility in the face of constant business change is a given in Acision’s sales operations. “All the compensation strategy changes we’ve gone through would have been exceedingly painful to accommodate using spreadsheets,” declares Palmer. “We’d have had major issues with control, error rates and time. But with Xactly Incent, implementing these changes and adjustments has been relatively painless and quick.”

Acision recently added 50 sales engineers into its Xactly Incent deployment, some of whom have never been on a variable compensation plan before. “Their compensation was previously processed through HR, not sales, with lots of paper involved,” says Palmer. “But with Incent, it can all happen in one automated system, making it very straightforward. More importantly, by adding variable compensation to this new organization through Xactly Incent, we can also now align their behavior more closely to the sales teams they support.”

Low-cost, low-maintenance compensation management
Selecting a 100-percent on-demand SaaS application like Xactly Incent has enabled Acision to keep costs low and to stay more agile in contrast to an on-premise solution. To gain further advantage, Acision decided to take advantage of Xactly’s managed service option. “Going with SaaS providers like Xactly and salesforce.com has been a big plus,” says Palmer. “We opted for Xactly’s managed service option because our staff roles were rapidly changing, and in practice it has been quite helpful in enabling staff savings. A single person, and only part time at that, now serves as the sole interface between us and Xactly – a shining example of doing more with less.”

Concludes Palmer, “The major improvements we’re seeing because of Xactly Incent are increased control over plan acceptance, real-time visibility into commissions earned, better business agility at a lower cost, and more strategic sales behaviors. Any one of these improvements would be great. Having them all is like winning the lottery.”