What stood out about Xactly for the team and myself is the good balance of out-of-the box capabilities as well as the customization abilities without the complex buildout and administration.
We were using another solution and Excel… and we were looking for a solution that would provide us end-to-end functions. Being able to connect the quota planning side to plan document routing and tracking to commissions calculations.
Learn how Jeannie Liang, VP of Finance Operations at Qualys — a leader in the cybersecurity and compliance industry— revolutionized compensation processes with Xactly Incent. Jeannie highlights the solution’s impact on quota planning, document routing, and commission calculations. Through customization, user-friendly administration features, and out-of-the-box capabilities — see how Incent can transform your compensation management system and drive success in your organization.
Xactly: Talk us through your career and experience that led you to your role at Gainsight and tell us about your company and business model?
Jeannie: Over the last 20 years my career experience has been mostly in technology and medical companies; I would say healthcare companies. The more notable companies I've been at is Mckesson, Yelp, and Kaiser. Some folks might find those familiar in the Bay Area especially.
Over those years I've spent most of the time in financial and strategic planning also known as FP&N. We spend most of our time essentially covering budgeting, long-term planning, cost structure improvements, mergers and acquisitions, and integrations of those, as well as systems implementation among other things. What led me to essentially leading the commission's team is I took on a very different role and I'm currently VP of Finance operations at Qualys; and what that really means - because many people are like “What's Finance Operations?” - is that we're the right-hand team for the CFO where she really needs a team and leader to go in to help provide discipline on processes and financial rigor. That's where my team comes in: we flex different muscles, we have different skill sets as part of the team to really help optimize or bring optimization to the financial organization. And that's really where my commission journey begins… and the rest is history!
What our company provides in terms of solutions is cloud-based security and compliance solutions. A few services that I wanted to share is that we have vulnerability management, cloud-based security, web application security, and endpoint security. You can see the common denominator here really is to mitigate threats and risk to company's digital assets, and really also provide compliance management - and in this very scary threat environment, cyber threat environment - our company really wants to make sure that other companies, our clients, understand what threats are out there and is able to minimize and mitigate these risks.
Xactly: How were you calculating and managing commissions before Xactly?
Jeannie: Before evaluating and considering Xactly, our company, Qualys, was using another tool, slash solution as well as Excel. Excel has always been a good backbone to our commission process and what led us essentially to looking at Xactly is because we were looking for a solution that would provide us end to-end functions from quota planning, being able to connect the quota planning side to plan document routing and tracking, to commission's calculations, being able to essentially have incentive compensation statements that were part of the system and not manual - that was huge - as well as the tail end of it, the reporting and analytics part.
Xactly: When thinking about your ICM and SPM practices, what led you to evaluate a solution like Xactly?
Jeannie: The reason why we thought about Xactly is that when you think about compensation and being in that space, the most important part is your employees, right? - your sales or GTM employees. You want to do right by your employees and ensure that the compensation you're providing to them is speedy because that's important for them, because that's their livelihood, and accuracy. And so having a tool is really important to us because it definitely does provide access to information much quicker as they close their book of business, and how does that translate to their commissions.
Xactly: What were some challenges you noticed in your evaluation of other ICM provider?
Jeannie: As we were evaluating the different ICM providers what we saw in the different offerings and what was important to us was the degree of customization available, plus the ease of administration, as well as the resource needs to manage the solution subsequently. So we were very careful about looking at the customization specificities.
Xactly: What stood out about Xactly? What made Xactly different in your evaluation?
Jeannie: What stood out about Xactly for the team and myself is the good balance of out of the box capabilities as well as the customization abilities, without the complex buildout and administration subsequently.
Xactly: We often hear about pre-built capabilities vs custom solutions. What’s your perspective on this? How does Xactly support your team in this way?
Jeannie: For our organization, I think the out of the box is really important for us because it provides the structure that our organization needs. I think people could be very creative and we want to limit that capability, yet kind of have, as I mentioned before, the customization that our organization currently needs in order to make the commission calculation work for us.
Xactly: When you think about the future of ICM and SPM, what capabilities would you like to see out of solutions like Xactly?
Jeannie: When I think about the future of ICM and SPM, I think what would be important always is a reduction in processing time, the ease of administration. With a lot of AI coming out, how is Xactly utilizing that new technology to improve on reducing the time to process, reducing the time and creating more ease in the administration of the tool.
Xactly: What are some of the features of Incent that you or your GTM teams like the most?
Jeannie: The features that I and my GTM team like the most is definitely the user interface and the ease of navigation. We've been able to essentially move away from manual incentive statements because the professional look of the incentive statements were really important to us, and previously with the tool that we had, we weren't able to do that. So that saved a lot of time for my team and then for the GTM team. I think just having access to their comp statement information, the opportunities that's closed as well as the commissions that it translates to on a pretty close to just in time basis, as the data flows in is really important; it helps motivate the team, I would say.
Xactly: What’s one achievement you’re proud of or one attribute of Xactly’s solutions you’re most happy with?
Jeannie: Definitely being able to launch at the time in which we were planning which is 2024, Q1. Not having to be on two tools is a huge accomplishment and secondly being able to just move out of excel statements. We used to produce a few hundred every quarter and that was an incredible amount of time consumption for my team, and now we can focus that same amount of time on analytics and performance management