Driving Performance Through Partnership: A Q&A with Sohail Arshad of Accenture

Sales compensation is about more than just numbers; it’s about impacting families, fostering clarity, and driving performance. For Sohail Arshad, a Total Rewards Senior Manager at the global professional services firm Accenture, these principles are at the heart of his work. In this Q&A, Sohail details the success story of how clarifying a single comp plan directly empowered a sales team to achieve 130% of its annual quota in just six months. He also explains how his team leverages the flexibility of Xactly Extend to solve unique business requirements, allowing them to create tailored, user-friendly solutions for their most complex compensation-related processes. Discover his perspective on how clarity and the right technology can unlock performance.

Q: Could you tell us about your role and background?

A: Sohail Arshad is a Total Rewards Senior Manager at Accenture, where he is responsible for the end-to-end design, strategy, and execution of all sales compensation plans. He joined Accenture in 2021 after the company sought a candidate with his specific blend of a sales background combined with expertise in process improvement, enhancements, and project management. He has now been with the company for four years.

Q: What do you love about working in compensation?

A: He loves that his work in compensation has a direct and meaningful impact that extends beyond the employees to their families. The satisfaction of knowing that he is helping people provide for their families is what he truly loves about his role.

Q: What are you proud of in your compensation career?

A: He is proud of his work in streamlining and simplifying complex sales compensation plans by speaking directly with salespeople to gather their feedback. In one instance, a team told him their plan had "more exceptions than norms." By working with HR and business leaders to simplify the plan, the sales team was better able to understand how they were paid. This clarity directly led to improved performance, with the team achieving 130% of their annual quota in just six months.

"I'm a firm believer of going and speaking directly to the sales people to fully understand what they like, what they dislike about the sales comp plan and collecting feedback from the source..."

Q: What do you love about your partnership with Xactly?

A: He says the best part of the partnership is the people. While he notes the product is great, he believes it's the high-quality, easy-to-work-with people—like his Customer Success Manager (CSM) and Technical Account Manager (TAM)—who truly elevate the experience. He feels that a great experience on top of a great product is the key, and he considers his Xactly contacts to be an extension of his own team.

"When you have a great experience on top of a great product that really enhances my experience. That's what I love about our partnership with Xactly. I call my CSM and my TAM my extended team.”

Q: What is something that sets Xactly apart from other companies?

A: Sohail shares that Xactly is set apart by its "superior service." Based on his experience working with other vendors, he believes the level of service he receives from Xactly is unmatched.

"I have worked with other vendors and the kind of service that we get from Xactly - I have not seen that anywhere."

Q: What new Xactly features or solutions are you most excited about?

A: Sohail is excited about two key areas: the new AI features being developed and the company's strong focus on simplification and seamless integration between its different applications.

Q: What piece of advice would you give to someone starting in your role?

A: Sohail would advise new professionals to leverage flexible tools to solve unique and complex business problems that fall outside standard processes. He illustrates this with a recent example where his team used the Xactly Extend module to build a crucial, non-hierarchical, two-level approval process for executive bonuses. The tool's flexibility to use custom data was key to creating a simple and user-friendly interface for top leadership, which led to a successful rollout and universally positive feedback. He emphasizes that having access to such a flexible tool is "wonderful" and allows his team to solve other business needs, like capturing offline data for more complete reporting.

"The flexibility that Extend offered was it allowed us to upload our own data set that allowed us the flexibility to choose which is the level one approver and who is the level two approver regardless of the hierarchy."