Sales performance management specialist Xactly announced the release of a sales compensation application, Incent Express, aimed at small to midsize businesses that employ Salesforce CRM.

Built natively on Salesforce.com's Force.com platform, Incent Express helps midmarket companies create sales compensation plans, calculate commissions and export payments to payroll. Currently available to Enterprise Edition and Unlimited Edition Salesforce CRM customers, its pricing is $29.95 per subscriber per month with a one-time setup fee.

The application allows users to create commission plans based on custom criteria, such as deal amount, product margin, product mix, discount percent or non-cash values (like hours or quantity of deals), and includes automated reporting and real-time dashboards to help understand and modify team and sales rep behavior and realign sales efforts to meet changing business dynamics. The application also features automated deal assignment from any accounting system for commissions that are based on invoices or cash receipt tracked in another system.

Greg Volm, director of corporate sales at InsideView, which offers its own sales intelligence application, SalesView, said his company has experienced a “tremendous amount of growth” in the past year and its manual, Excel-based commissions process was not scaling. “With Xactly’s Incent Express, we quickly automated a very time- and labor-intensive process and have given visibility and predictability to our changing commission process," he said.

The application also helps businesses create compensation plans, including commissions, draws, bonuses and SPIFs, as well as costing and analyzing compensation plan changes in advance of implementation. Additional features include the ability to rank teams by quota and identify pay versus performance so companies can spot when reps start "gaming" the plan.

On its Website, Xactly offers a 30-day free trial of the application as well as video demonstration that highlights its features. The site also offers a “Live Chat” customer service and education feature.

"Xactly first revolutionized the sales compensation space five years ago when we pioneered the world's first on-demand compensation solution, which replaced inflexible and expensive on-premises solutions," said Xactly CEO Christopher Cabrera. "Now, with Xactly Incent Express, even the smallest businesses can afford an automated compensation solution—eliminating human error and providing access to performance data."

Liz Cobb, Xactly’s general manager of SMB solutions, said most companies today are still burdened with managing the sales compensation process in spreadsheets—costing them valuable time and limiting real-time visibility into sales performance. "With real-time sales performance and insight, rapid setup and best practices for compensation design strategy, SMBs can accelerate growth, modify and incentivize behavior and make more informed business decisions," Cobb said.