Xactly Greases the Gears in Express 2.2

Xactly has updated its Express product, a sales compensation management application designed for small and medium-sized businesses. Xactly Express 2.2 comes with more ways for sales reps to customize their dashboards and more features for administrators to manage the information flow to the reps.

Simplifying and streamlining operations is Express’ raison d’etre in the first place, said Chris Newton, Xactly’s vice president of marketing and sales.

“Small companies do not have the IT resources in house — or necessarily the sales compensation expertise –to spend a lot of time implementing and configuring an application, he told CRM Buyer.

Customizable Pods

One change Xactly made with this release was to give reps more ways to slice their information, along with a new way to display these metrics, Xactly Product Expert Mike Davis told CRM Buyer.

“They can now control several different new attributes, including the different products, time lines and so on,” he said.

They can display this information via the application’s new pod feature — essentially, a design element that pulls out and highlights certain partts of the dashboard.

For instance, a lot of reps are compensated in terms of annual sales or production — but their managers might be more concerned with quarterly performance, Davis explained. So, while the screen may be focused on annual stats, a rep could develop a pod to highlight performance on a quarterly basis. Or vice versa.

Users can shuffle these pods to customize what they want to most see on their dashboards, Davis said. “They are also very powerful in that they provide even greater transparency.”

Integrating Data

The new version of Express also provides new administration features to more easily and quickly integrate data from the Salesforce.com CRM app into the sales compensation application.

“Administrators can pull data from the CRM app without having to do much, if any, customization,” noted Davis. “There is no mapping behind the scenes, in other words, to bring this data in.”

This results in a user being able to click from opportunity to account or opportunity to team effortlessly, he said. “End users can traverse between the different objects without having any coding to support this.”

New scheduling tools are also available, allowing administrators to schedule updates of certain sales data on a regular period — say, importing new opportunities on Sunday night so they are available Monday morning.

Simple Search

Better search functionality is also part of the mix. The application lets an admin search the database for certain attributes by keyword, such as the name of a client.

“This can be important,” Davis pointed out, “if the client might be buying 150 different types of products and you have territories or reps changing.”