Webnewswire caught up with Kandarp Desai, Senior Vice President of Engineering and GM for India, at the inauguration of the swanky new office of Xactly in Bengaluru’s EcoWorld. The following are the excerpts of the exclusive interview:
Kandarp Desai, SVP Engineering & GM India, Xactly
What is Xactly’s “Intelligent Revenue Platform.” How will this platform play a role in the future of revenue management?
Kandarp Desai: Xactly’s Intelligent Revenue Platform (IRP) uses a data-driven approach to offer insights throughout the entire Sales Performance Management (SPM) process, from sales planning to execution, including compensation and optimization. It has benefited over 1,200 customers in 130 countries and millions of sellers worldwide in achieving their revenue goals. Executing tedious processes across a large, multi-threaded tech stack is hard. That’s why we’ve embraced extensibility and composability—simple, powerful process automation, and more tailored experiences to meet the nuanced needs of teams today. Xactly Extend complements our purpose-built products by providing natural extensions for adjacent processes (e.g., approvals, roster management, objectives, and crediting structures), and bespoke applications to automate activities along complex workflows that span Xactly solutions and external data sources.
Xactly has introduced Xactly AI Copilot, an AI engine designed to transform how businesses handle and enhance their revenue processes. By eliminating the need to navigate through multiple systems, dashboards, and offline processes, Xactly AI Copilot presents insights in a context-specific manner, ensuring that information is delivered in the most meaningful way for each user’s workflow.
How does Xactly improve sales performance?
Kandarp Desai: Xactly helps improve sales performance by providing a comprehensive SPM solution that fosters transparency, builds credibility, automates tasks, empowers data-driven decision-making, and motivates sales teams through effective incentive compensation plans.
How do you see the role of AI evolving within the Sales Performance Management (SPM) industry?
Kandarp Desai: We believe AI will fundamentally transform the SPM domain. Given the technological advancements brought upon by generative AI, in the future, SPM practitioners will be able to leverage natural language to optimise their end-to-end revenue lifecycle. This will dramatically improve the connectedness of the business processes SPM serves to support and will allow practitioners to complete their tasks at the speed of thought, with intelligent nudges ensuring they are taking the best next action given how their business is performing. And because we have been aggregating and anonymizing pay and performance data across our customer base for nearly two decades, we will be able to help revenue organisations improve their workflows and decision-making by benchmarking their activity relative to their peers and/or organisations with performance they aspire to match.
What are the biggest challenges and opportunities you foresee for Xactly in the global SPM market?
Kandarp Desai: The biggest current challenge is also the biggest opportunity for Xactly in the global SPM market. Revenue organisations are being asked to deliver profitable growth which typically requires them to deliver growth without being able to increase the size of their revenue teams. In order for revenue organisations to be successful in this macroeconomic environment, they need to think about their revenue lifecycle holistically. To do that they need to plan for how they will allocate their scarce go-to-market resources, they need to understand the potential financial return on their investment in go-to-market, they need to effectively manage the inevitable changes to their go-to-market coverage model, they need to ensure their go-to-market resources are compensated accurately and on-time and they need to constantly forecast the expected performance of the go-to-market team to proactively course-correct as-needed. Xactly is the only provider in the global SPM market that offers solutions that support this end-to-end revenue lifecycle in an integrated, collaborative, intelligent, and continuous manner.
How will Xactly leverage its Indian operations to stay ahead of these challenges and capitalise on upcoming opportunities?
Kandarp Desai: Our India office has been indispensable in our global success. Our founders were amongst the visionaries who identified the potential talent of the Indian community. India is at the cusp of growth and development. The Indian youth bring an immense pool of talent. With our strong impetus for their nurturing and development, the Indian operations will remain a force that will help us stay ahead of future challenges and leverage the upcoming opportunities.
The expansion mentions fostering corporate social responsibility initiatives. Can you share some specific ways Xactly plans to give back to the Indian community?
Kandarp Desai: Xactly has an unwavering commitment to giving back to society. Through our core initiative XactlyOne, we organise volunteer opportunities and projects for our employees. We encourage them to take action and donate their time and talents in their local neighbourhoods. XactlyOne volunteers strive to make a meaningful impact and create positive changes. The rewarding experience of helping others further strengthens the Xactly team. Since 2005, we are proud to have over 4,200 volunteers, giving over 25,000 hours of service, and raising over $ 1 million. Many causes are quite close to our hearts. This includes end-of-life care for terminally ill cancer patients. We will keep giving back to the Indian community in our ways.
