IronPort

IronPort Sales into Superior Sales Compensation Management with Xactly Corporation

"In selecting Xactly we looked at how much time we were spending updating sales compensation information manually, and how many errors were being made in the process. Spreadsheet-based sales compensation management may work in a small office, but adding, changing and working with large amounts of data in a spreadsheet environment with 100 sales reps is near impossible.”

- Danielle Murcray, IronPort, Vice President and Corporate Controller

Challenge
IronPort Systems, Inc. is the leading gateway security provider for organizations ranging from small businesses to the Global 2000. (NOTE: IronPort announced it was being acquired by Cisco Systems in January 2007.) The company, which was founded in 2000, has more than 400 employees, including 100 sales representatives in 35 countries around the world.

As IronPort expanded geographically in recent years, so too had the scope of the products and services it sold. Selling new products is a challenge for any business, on multiple levels, not the least of which is the process by which an organization compensates sales staff for deals closed. At the top level, sales commissions and quotas, the relationship between the two and the role each plays in optimizing sales performance, were critical issues for a company.

When handled thoughtfully, the business process known as sales compensation management, positively impacts a business’s ability to meet and exceed its sales and corporate objectives. On the other hand, a poor sales compensation management strategy can have disastrous effects.

In the spring of 2006, IronPort set out to replace its spreadsheet-based sales compensation management system. Key among the requirements for a new system was that it be Web-based and delivered via the “on-demand” model, complete with a multi-tenant architecture and subscription-based pricing. IronPort wanted no part of conventional enterprise software, with its expensive cost, lack of flexibility and lengthy deployment and maintenance problems. A second criteria was that the solution integrate “out-of-the-box” to their salesforce.com customer relationship management (CRM) system. Finally, the on-demand solution needed to include powerful tools for activity monitoring and reporting, so as to ensure compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) and other federal regulations.

Solution
After a comprehensive review of available solutions, IronPort determined that Xactly Incent™ from Xactly Corporation (www.xactlycorp.com) would fit ideally as the focal point of its sales compensation and performance management strategy. Xactly Incent enables businesses to design, deploy, audit and optimize its sales compensation management program. It is also the only on-demand sales compensation management company to offer seamless integration to salesforce.com.

Benefits
Using Xactly, IronPort sales representatives can see how they are being paid. Since Xactly is an on-demand solution, IronPort management benefits from the ability to track sales activities over extended periods of time, the result of which is enhanced Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance and visibility into the sales process.

Whereas spreadsheet-based sales compensation management provides only a static point-in-time view into compensation and does not provide an archive or audit trail as changes are made to compensation as required by SOX, Xactly Incent ensures that every change to a plan is completely logged and can be individually tracked, providing a complete audit trail.