SPM Vendor Conversation with Excentive International

The landscape of the Sales Performance Management (SPM) space continues to evolve.  This year alone there has been two major acquisitions and a number of very competitive selection deals in a North American market that is certainly heating up as we get farther along into 2012.   

A number of recent competitive SPM deals have been won by Excentive International.  Excentive International is well established in the EMEA market but to North American buyers it may be a company that many people aren't familiar with.  To provide some more information on their company and how they are building momentum in a hyper-competitive market space I sat down and had a discussion with Joe Kaddis, North American GM and President of Excentive International.

Justin: For the people who aren’t familiar with Excentive International, tell us about the company

Joe: Excentive International is a Total Compensation software provider, which makes us absolutely unique in the marketplace.  That means we cover all aspects of compensation, including sales incentive compensation, bonus plans, salary planning, performance reviews, and long term incentives.  We are a global and employee-controlled company, with 60+ industry leaders that span virtually every vertical – we work with some of the  largest, most complex and international companies in the world such as Vodafone, Telecom Italia, Turkcell, Mercedes, Stryker, Orange, Novartis, Total BearingPoint, Saudi Aramco or Veolia.  We partner globally with OpenSymmetry, as you know, as well as with Accenture and Avanade, and some local comp vendors in other parts of the world. 

Justin: This year looks to be a breakout year for Excentive in N. America, what would you attribute that success to?

Joe: Yes, in line with our global strategy, this year is proving to be significant for North America. Our model has proved successful in Europe and now the same model is proving success in the US.  In addition to the strength of our model, the ability of our solution to support compensation complexity, global scale and manage change also contributes to our growing success in North America. Case in point is a win we have had recently at a major software vendor.  They are the definition of complex with  25K+ Sales people and  1000+ individual plans, and generate more than 40M transactions per day, from  100+ countries and 6 continents.  After an intense 6 month evaluation against just about every player in the Industry, Excentive International was unanimously chosen because of our ability 1) to manage complexity, 2) to change easily and quickly and 3) to communicate effectively. Fundamentally Excentive International’s solution empowers companies to use compensation to adapt and grow in their markets. 

Justin: Who do you see as your competition and how do you differentiate / stack up against them?

Joe: There are two arenas in which we compete; ICM and HR compensation.  In the ICM/Sales area we compete against the traditional ICM vendors like Callidus and Varicent.  In HR compensation – salary, bonus, performance reviews, etc. – we typically compete against HR suites like SuccessFactors, even though often times we are used alongside those suites.  As a 3-year old company, currently our biggest challenge is name recognition.  Given our relatively small size, we can’t really afford to compete for deals without winning them. We are now spending much more time on analyzing an opportunity before competing for it, making sure it is in our sweet spot: large complex compensation project. Doing this, our win ratio is very high.  Generally, the more exhaustive the evaluation, the better we fare: everyone has a good looking demo, but it is when the customer takes the time to really understand the “how” and the “why” that we win.  

Justin: Anything else you would like to promote – upcoming conferences, webinars, articles, etc. 

Joe: We will be conducting one on one briefings by appointment at World of Work’s Spotlight on Incentive Compensation in Chicago August 29-31st and Total Reward Conference in Toronto on September 19-21st.  Please email me directly at Joe.Kaddis@excentive.com or call me at 203-557-3691 to set up some time at the event or to discuss your compensation management projects.

Justin: thanks Joe, appreciate your time. 

Some relevant links -  

Excentive International: http://www.excentive.com/

WorldatWork's Spotlight on Incentive Compensation (I’ll be attending as well): http://www.worldatwork.org/waw/salescompspotlight/html/index.jsp

Total Reward Conference: http://www.worldatwork.org/waw/toronto2012/html/index.jsp

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