How Desert Financial improved compensation plans & saved time with Xactly Incent

Xactly sat down with Sara Reinstein, Director of Compensation, and Matt Mills, Retail Incentive Program Director at Desert Financial Credit Union, to discuss the impact of using Xactly Incent in their organization. Here’s what they have to say about the reliable and time-saving technology.

Compensation Analytics at Desert Financial Before Xactly

Long nights, market uncertainty, and legacy solutions plagued Desert Financial when it came to Incentive Compensation Management (ICM).

Since the mid-2010s, Desert Financial used a combination of Excel and other legacy middleware solutions for its incentive compensation calculations. Despite the comfort of using Excel internally, it proved to be a time-consuming, tedious way to calculate payroll and incentive plans. For example, at the end of pay periods the team would end up working anywhere from midnight to 2am trying to manually update spreadsheets to ensure payroll could process on time.

Analytics is also a high priority for Desert Financial. The organization provides custom reports to each employee so they can see personalized details related to their own deals and incentive plans. Under the previous system, pulling year-over-year pay-out files could take up to 10 minutes to generate for each salesperson. Additionally, if any updates were made to the previous system, it would impact how analytics were run, causing Desert Financial’s team to rebuild reports that the operating system broke.

On top of this, like most other businesses, Desert Financial is constantly adapting to the ups and downs of market uncertainty and needs the ability to quickly adjust revenue and compensation plans to make sure they pay employees fair incentives while staying on track toward revenue goals.

Why Xactly Incent?

Flexibility is a core requirement for organizations facing market uncertainty, and Desert Financial reviews incentive compensation monthly, not just quarterly, to make sure that the business isn't overly impacted by this uncertainty.

To help with this, what Desert Financial needed was a system that could quickly and accurately calculate compensation data.

By introducing Xactly Incent, Desert Financial now has the ability to regularly make the necessary changes to create a fair incentive program for their sales reps.

Xactly has kept its promise of providing timely, accurate incentive calculations while outperforming against previous solutions while making life easier for Desert Financial’s team members across departments. This has made Xactly Incent a platform that both leaders and sales reps trust.

The difference between Xactly Incent and our previous system is night and day. I just pulled an analytics report this morning and it took about five seconds.

Measuring Success with Xactly Incent

Before implementing Xactly Incent, it would take Desert Financial five times longer to calculate payroll. Now, data and analytics requests are completed 99% faster, going from 10 minutes to five seconds.

This has increased transparency throughout the organization: managers and team leaders can easily access employee information without constant back and forth, and the incentive and revenue teams can make quick market adjustments whenever the economy throws a wrench in their plans to ensure that employees are compensated fairly while revenue projections stay on track.

More time is now spent on supporting team members instead of manually updating dashboards, and sales reps trust that compensation amounts are correct and updated in real-time.

Results using Xactly Incent at Desert Financial

• Reliability: Teams can rely on Xactly to not break or change calculations when system updates occur.
• Time Saved: With Xactly, pulling analytics takes less time, allowing employees to get tasks done faster and provide better, more in-depth answers to the executive team.
• Automation: Xactly Incent generates reports in seconds without the need for individuals to manually update formulas.
• Accuracy: Automation improves the accuracy of the data and reports created. There is less room for human error, as Xactly’s technology does the heavy lifting.
• Increased Transparency: Xactly Incent allows team leads to view individual dashboards and see how much they’ve sold, what they need to get done and where their progress stands.
• Trust: Sales reps trust the results from Xactly Incent and its proven accuracy.
• Visibility: Sales reps have direct visibility into their compensation in real-time, which has the added benefit of improving the overall employee experience.

What’s Next for Desert Financial and Xactly

The partnership Desert Financial has with Xactly will help it navigate continued market fluxes without late nights and broken reports, and will allow Desert Financial to manage its incentive compensation management programs across multiple lines of business.