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Kaminario salesmen will now be told why they're earning their dosh

Manual compo system gets junked for modern tech

Kaminario’s sales reps will now be able to know how and why they are being paid because a manual system to work out their compensation has been junked.

The reps sell a highly-automated K2 all-flash array to deliver blindingly fast data access to applications needing data.

Yet, when they filed their sales reports, there was a mountain to climb because Kaminario’s sales compensation admin staff manually worked out exactly what compensation they were due. Kaminario has international operations and so various currencies were involved.

The beancounters were spending days every month calculating payments from the complicated sales plans to ensure accuracy. But, despite the significant time and energy put into the process, reps still couldn’t determine why and how they were being paid.

Jim Milton, Kaminario’s director of sales operations, knew this couldn’t go on as the company grew. He said: “Between the manual adjustments, complex plans and lack of integration with our existing business systems, we knew the time had come to automate our processes so that we could continue to scale and provide cross-company transparency.”

Kaminario is a Salesforce.com user and it decided to use an Xactly service, which integrated with that, to automate the compensation calculation process. Xactly provides enterprise-class and cloud-based incentive compensation services for employee and sales performance management.

Milton said they looked around but selected SaaS from Xactly because it was easy to use, integrated with Salesforce and they could see an obvious ROI. Presumably this includes much less pissed-off reps and sales admin staff doing more useful work.

The manual sales compensation process has been eliminated, with Kaminario saying the Xactly replacement provides increased visibility and means it can easily pay its sales people in various currencies.

Other Xactly compensation SaaS customers in our storage neck of the woods are EVault (now owned by Carbonite, so the compensation incentives didn’t work too well for Seagate), Rackspace, Docusign, and Interxion.

How odd that any supplier in the business of selling business automation hardware and software should use a manual sales rep compensation calculation process. It’s like picking a new mobile phone by using slide rules or an abacus to work out the service plan costs. Come on guys, get with the program. ®

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