I wanted to be able to do things ourselves… and the other thing I really liked was the remote access to the field where they could see their incentive statements on the fly.
Abiomed, a leader in heart pump technology serving hospitals and healthcare providers worldwide, was facing a good problem: rapid growth. Even with success in a complex, relationship-driven sales motion that requires deep engagement with medical professionals and procurement teams, Abiomed faced challenges in aligning sales incentives with performance goals while navigating stringent regulatory requirements.
In a hyper-competitive market with other leading medtech firms, Abiomed was struggling to ensure its sales team had the visibility they needed to remain motivated and focused, while also managing a quickly expanding sales organization with multiple different incentive plans. This led to Abiomed beginning its search for potential partners that could not only handle the scale of their growing sales team but could also support their Management By Objectives (MBO) process.
Xactly recently sat down with Bob Quinn, Manager, Financial Planning and Analysis and Tara Zraunig, Senior Sales Compensation Analyst, at Abiomed to learn more about their journey to automated ICM and MBO processes.
Key Results
Can now calculate commissions for twice as many payees in half the time
Cut time to manage MBO process by 50%
Scaled their ICM program from 50 to 900 payees with full transparency for sales teams
The Challenge
In 2014, the Abiomed compensation team was manually managing sales commissions using Excel spreadsheets. This process became increasingly unsustainable as the company began quickly growing from around 50 sales representatives to nearly 900 in 2025, with 25 different plans to support.
I wanted to be able to do things ourselves… and the other thing I really liked was the remote access to the field where they could see their incentive statements on the fly
By 2023, Abiomed's incentive compensation team had expanded their scope to supporting roles with Management by Objectives (MBO) plans., This process was manual, involving managers filling out individual Excel spreadsheets for each employee, summarizing the data, and uploading final payout information into Xactly Incent.
This method posed several challenges:
- Time-Consuming Processes: Payroll processing took approximately four weeks, delaying payments and increasing administrative burden.
- Risk of Errors: Manual data entry led to frequent inaccuracies in payout calculations.
The Solution
Recognizing the need for a more automated and transparent system, Abiomed began searching for a scalable solution - handled mostly by one person at that time. This led to initial conversations with Xactly in late 2014, ultimately resulting in the Abiomed team transitioning to Xactly Incent. As the team got familiar with Xactly, and the number of pay on an MBO plan grew from 15 to 150, the team realized their MBO process also needed an overhaul.
Enter Xactly Extend, which was initially introduced to the team at the Xactly Upside in 2024 and was highlighted by other customers as a primary driver of accelerated automation in their own unique processes. Seeing its potential, the Abiomed team collaborated with Xactly's Professional Services team to better understand their ideal solutions and the capabilities of Extend.
The Abiomed team wanted a system that would:
- Automate the MBO submission, calculation, and payout process.
- Improve Accuracy by eliminating manual data entry errors.
- Enhance Transparency by allowing sales representatives to track their MBO progress in real-time.
- Enable Integration with Xactly Incent for seamless data flow.
We said, you know what there's pieces of this information that already exist in Incent. So can we integrate the pieces of that information back into this app we're creating? That was a big thing for us.
The Results
The result was a straightforward evaluation process and a clear path for the Xactly team to build a tailored application to automate their MBO processes. Along the way, the Abiomed team was clear and transparent about what they wanted, and they were happy to hear that even as they unpacked more complex requirements, the Xactly team was able to collaborate on an ideal solution.
Abiomed collaborated with Xactly’s team to build an Extend-based MBO application that mirrored their previous spreadsheet workflows, but much more streamlined with automation and real-time reporting capabilities replacing manual workarounds. Key benefits realized included:
Like roster management, we decided, instead of somebody going through and clicking a box for each individual person, we said: ‘can we do something by title?’ And they were able to pull titles straight from Incent. And then we can create a roster based on those titles.
- Reduced Processing Time: The time required to manage MBOs was cut in half—from four weeks to two weeks—by eliminating manual data entry and direct integration with Incent.
- Improved Accuracy: The automated system eliminated the risk of human error in data transcription, ensuring precise incentive calculations.
- Greater Transparency:Sales reps and managers now access detailed MBO performance data through a user-friendly interface, fostering trust in the program.
- Improved Efficiency in Roster Management: Instead of manually selecting employees for MBO plans, Extend enabled automated roster creation based on job titles and other criteria, reducing administrative workload.
- Seamless Data Flow: The new system automatically pushed final payout calculations into Xactly Incent, ensuring consistency across incentive management processes.
Next Steps for Abiomed
Abiomed’s adoption of Xactly Extend demonstrates the power of extensibility in compensation management. By leveraging Incent’s prepackaged features and Extend’s flexible capabilities, Abiomed transformed cumbersome, error-prone processes into an efficient, scalable, and transparent system. As a next step, Abiomed is exploring further Extend projects, including HR data integration, reinforcing its commitment to digital transformation and operational efficiency.