Marcura Navigates the Waves of Incentive Compensation Management With Xactly

The Challenge

Success in the Shipping and Maritime industry requires businesses to adapt quickly to change and have a diversified sales approach. Keeping up with these ever-changing needs along with industry demands was leading to overly manual and risky payout calculations, resulting in misaligned sales tactics, missed targets, and an overall sense of confusion across the Go-to-market (GTM) organization from a lack of transparency.

The Solution

Xactly removed blockers for Marcura's Compensation Management team by automating their previously labor-intensive process. Once up and running, Marcura gained a centralized platform that seamlessly aligned sales targets with incentive plans, delivering more accurate commission calculations, clear lines of sight into performance, and fostering a culture of accountability and high performance throughout their Sales teams.

Proof in the Stats

With Xactly Incent, Marcura improved its commission processing time from 3 weeks to 5 days — a 76% reduction in cycle time.

One of the things that stood out for me was the partnership element in respect of the fact that you had a Commissions team that we could lean on whether for a commission or a best practice question or whether to go look at my comp plans and tell me where we've got things that we don't need. And frankly, Xactly’s track record and client list in terms of being able to manage commissions with some really complex businesses.

Marcura, a leading provider of technology solutions in the Maritime and Shipping industry, operates in a highly complex and myriad business environment, offering various solutions tailored to different use cases and personas — from solving payment problems to workflow enhancements. These complexities made managing compensation for Marcura’s numerous Sales roles extremely difficult.

Navigating Choppy Waters

Using multiple offline tools and supporting varied use cases, Marcura faced tricky compensation challenges. The company grappled with ensuring the accuracy of various compensation components, like sales commissions, bonuses, and other variable pay elements, while also trying to foster greater transparency in its incentive compensation management (ICM) processes. These challenges began because their tools weren’t connected, so information flow wasn’t always consistent, leading to rework and delays. Unfortunately, their commission calculations were all manual and time-consuming, taking approximately three weeks to complete.

Nathan Seldon, SVP of Go-to-Market at Marcura, recognized the challenges and spearheaded Marcura's journey to improve its ICM processes. Critical factors in choosing Xactly included its native experiences within Salesforce CRM, its partnership element, access to commission experts, and its track record of successful implementations with complex businesses.

“We just hit a critical point in time where we had been managing it on spreadsheets. And it just hit a point where it was like, this just doesn't make sense that it needs to become more of a non-event where it's like we are just running a couple of checks and then putting it through the approval layers that we have to get things paid.”

Smooth Sailing

By utilizing the native CRM experiences Xactly offers, Marcura was able to synchronize all their compensation data and implement ICM processes directly within Salesforce. This unification of systems provided the team with a consolidated, holistic view of their compensation data, eliminating redundant efforts and risk of errors. What’s more, all stakeholders, including Sales teams and leadership, have visibility and access to real-time and accurate compensation data directly within Salesforce, enhancing trust and confidence in the process.

By leveraging Xactly's best-in-class automation and enterprise calculation capabilities, Marcura achieved accurate and timely computations, enabling the team to align sales targets effectively with compensation plans, and fostering a culture of transparency and motivation within the Sales organization.

Beyond the Horizon: A Look Ahead

Now with Xactly Incent, Marcura's commission process takes about 5 days, with minimal manual work required — a 76% reduction in cycle time. With the efficient 5-day turnaround, the workload involved for each party remains minimal, with tasks ranging from half an hour to a couple of hours, ensuring a swift and streamlined compensation process.

“The time to opening up the process to closing it down was around 3 weeks which for us was just insane. And also reps had no visibility of what they were earning as well. So they were in the dark. Now we close everything down within 5 days. But I mean, the work within that is tiny. I might spend half an hour. RevOps might take 2 hours. Finance might spend 20 minutes.”

Looking ahead, Marcura will continue to leverage Xactly’s platform capabilities to optimize operations and foster a culture of ongoing improvement and growth. One transition is moving from a quarterly to a monthly compensation process, a project they weren’t able to accomplish with their previous processes. Recognizing the motivational benefits of monthly plans in driving Sales team performance, Xactly will enable Marcura to shift towards a more immediate and responsive compensation structure.