Intelligent Revenue - With Chris Cabrera, Founder and CEO Xactly

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Chris Cabrera, founder and CEO of Xactly. We'll be covering three main topic areas with Chris today. First, the Xactly journey from sales compensation to sales performance management to intelligent revenue. Second, intelligent revenue, what's the definition of the business value? And third, learnings from a founder who's went from startup to private equity portfolio company CEO. Chris, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Chris Cabrera** (1:11)
Thanks, Ray. Great to be with you and your audience. I founded Xactly back in 2005, so I've been in the compensation space for a long time, about 25 years. I started with a company called Caledas Software back in 1998, and then I founded Xactly in 2005, and as the first SaaS company in the space, took it public in 2015 And then Vista Private Equity bought me in 2017, took it private, and I've been operating under the Vista flag since 2017 And it's been a great, great journey for the last five years under them, and we've been transforming the company and really expanding beyond just Comp into an Intelligent Revenue platform, which we'll, I'm sure, talk a lot about. So it's been an exciting ride and really exciting to talk to you about it.

**Ray Rike** (2:00)
Congratulations on the journey so far. And I feel like I'm almost having a Vista Equity portfolio reunion here on the Metrics of Measure Up because we've had both the founder and CEO of salesloft and Nick Madden from Gainsight on the show.

**Chris Cabrera** (2:12)
Oh, those guys are great. Yeah, Nick and I go way back. We started a CEO group back when both of us were our companies were less than $5 million in revenue years and years ago. So it's been fun to kind of watch each other grow and help each other grow and then now be both part of the family. It's kind of fun.

**Ray Rike** (2:30)
It's interesting, even though we've become a much larger and more mature industry, it's still a small industry here in the SaaS world, especially in northern California. But you know, when people think of Xactly, they may think of incentive compensation management or sales performance management, but exactly as much more. So can you share a little bit of the recent evolution of Xactly over the last one to two years?

**Chris Cabrera** (2:52)
Yeah, they certainly do.
And that's rightfully so. I mean, that is our roots. We founded the company on compensation automation. We built a hundred million dollar public company, as I say, took it public in 2015 And that's really we were kind of a one trick pony doing compensation automation. But one of the reasons that I was excited to take it private and the reason I was attracted to the Vista idea was their proposal to me was we can take it out of the public eye and they could sort of be my rich uncle to go do some acquisitions and help me really outside the public eye build a portfolio or a platform play so that we could do more than just comp. Because our customers were just asking and demanding a lot more than that. And so today, the company really does three big things. We do sales planning. So you think about, you know, every year companies go through a process where they try to figure out how many reps are we going to hire? What's their productivity going to be? When are we going to hire them? You know, all that kind of stuff. They generally guess about 30 or 40 different things. And it turns out we know the majority of those guesses that they make because we have all the comp data and we know how the reps perform and we know what the territories look like. And so we got into the sales planning piece. Of course we do the comp piece. That's the second big pillar. And then the third big pillar we do is pipeline management and sales forecasting. And so those are the three big things we do. And then within that, there's lots of other things we do, like, you know, commission expense forecasting and commission accounting and things like that. But those are the three big pillars today that we do. And it's all under this umbrella of Intelligent Revenue. We call it the IRP or Intelligent Revenue Platform.