Zuora Improves Sales Compensation with Xactly Express

Testimonials & Case Studies / Zuora

Download the PDF

“With Xactly, we can add different plans, we can track things easily, we can compensate in different methodologies, and we can get all of that information through to Salesforce CRM.”

- Tyler Sloat from Zuora

About Zuora
Zuora is the fastest growing on-demand subscription billing and payment service. Built from the ground up by SaaS industry visionaries, Zuora is changing the way subscription based businesses manage and sell to customers, allowing them to bring new products to market in less time, and with less hassle, by providing a suite of quote-to-cash-to-renewal products.

Challenge
As a SaaS company, Zuora offers a variety of subscription products with multiple elements and a high degree of complexity from an accounting perspective. Like many young companies, Zuora used spreadsheets to administer and track several key financial metrics, including sales compensation. Adding to an innate desire for a better solution were several real business pains centered around the difficulty of using a manual process in a thoroughly digital industry.
Zuora's sales team consisted of about ten field sales reps supported by a team of dedicated solutions engineers, all paid variably on plans matched to their regions. Zuora also had plans to grow the field rapidly in the coming months. Adding to the complexity, since Zuora is a subscription based business, commissions are paid on the basis of partial cash collection with ACV, TCV and PS all potentially having different rates, thus putting a delay between the close of a deal and payment of commissions.
With only one person dedicating a portion of their time to sales compensation, it became clear that managing such a complex operation would be impossible without enlisting the aid of automation.

Benefits at a Glance

• Increased sales motivation
• Improved comp visibility
• Reduced errors and disputes

The Solution
After considering their requirements, Zuora ultimately selected Xactly Express as their sales compensation platform. As a fully multi-tenant application built on the force.com platform, Express was a perfect fit for Zuora because it provided the ideal combination of on-demand access, tight salesforce.com integration, and easy platform scalability – all with the flexibility of subscription based pricing. As well, Zuora has a resident force.com application, making it easy to share information and report between Zuora, Salesforce, and Xactly. The synergies between the two products provided a lot of additional value.
After a very short implementation, Zuora deployed Xactly Express to their entire sales team in addition to finance and management. The Zuora team started noticing benefits right away. With the power of automation, Express was already helping to make reps more aware of their commissions, while finance was having a much easier time managing the complex sales compensation process.
With these process improvements in place, Zuora has been experiencing a number of business benefits.

Benefits

Increased Sales Productivity
Xactly Express has helped improve Zuora's business in a number of areas, but one of the most noticeable was with field communication and motivation. Express offers a number of features that help improve sales rep productivity by making sales compensation a motivation instead of a concern. Thanks to automation, Zuora is now able to calculate and post commissions much faster than before, and reps can explore the details that lie behind specific payments simply by clicking on them to drill down for more information. Another Express feature, the Express Estimator, helps motivate reps to close deals by showing them potential commission payouts on their opportunities yet to close.

“From a user perspective, the transition between Xactly Express and Salesforce CRM is seamless.”

Better Process Accuracy
Moving from a manual process to Express has also helped Zuora improve the accuracy of sales compensation processing. Now, Zuora's finance team can import sales numbers directly from salesforce.com and export calculated results for payroll within the application, helping avoid transcription errors, and removing the variability of spreadsheets.
Implementing Express has also helped in the area of dispute resolution. Zuora used to err on the side of the sales reps, leaving themselves exposed to the possibility of overpaying. With Express, it is easy to see how each payment was calculated, drill down into the underlying data, and ensure that everything is processed exactly how it should be. In the event of a dispute, all they have to do is log into the system and let the numbers speak for themselves.

“With Express, it is easy to drill down into the underlying data, and ensure that everything is processed how it should.”

Improved Visibility and Reporting
When using spreadsheets, visibility was hit or miss, as it was dependent on reports that had to be put together with painstaking hours of pouring over spreadsheets and manually crunching numbers. Express has helped to change this, making life easier for finance and giving management a much greater degree of visibility into core business operations. With Express, managers can easily view reports and dashboards from within their salesforce.com environment, making it much easier to keep an eye on sales compensation and fine tune plans when necessary. Finance also benefits from automatic archiving of compensation data, as well as built in compliance rules that make worries about SOX compliance a thing of the past.
Room to Grow
As a growing company, it was critical that Zuora pick a sales compensation solution that could scale with them. Since Express is built on the force.com platform, scalability is inherent to its design. After implementing Express, Zuora has grown rapidly and was extremely pleased with how easy it was to add new hires to the system, as well as how quickly they adjusted to using the application.
Overall, Express has been a great addition to Zuora's business toolkit. Finance is pleased with increased accuracy and reduced workload, sales is benefitting from better commission visibility and increased motivation, and management can easily keep an eye on sales compensation through tight integration with salesforce.com.