If your Xactly sales planning environment feels unreliable, slow, or increasingly difficult to operate, resolving the tension in your IT environment is likely top of mind.
Bringing in specialists to conduct a Technical Health Check (THC) is widely considered the most effective way to identify and tackle where your IT infrastructure is experiencing system failure. However, not every Xactly sales management user with system performance issues needs a professional technology health check.
If you're in a place where processes are heavier, workarounds are common, and the team quietly adapts to manual processes to sustain business goals, your IT environment is a source of risk rather than an area of control.
The question isn't: should you fix your Xactly infrastructure? At this point, you should ask:
Do we need a Technical Health Check (THC)? And is it actually worth it?
This article breaks down the real costs and benefits of a Technical Health Check for problematic Xactly infrastructure, including who typically needs one, what determines ROI, and when a THC is not the right next step.
What a Technical Health Check Is
How to Tell If You Need a Technical Health Check For Xactly
In Short: Who Does (and Doesn't) Need An IT Health Check?
How Much Does a Technical Health Check Cost?
The Benefits of a Technical Health Check (and Where the ROI Comes From)
In the case of an Xactly-specific technology health check, a team of experts who specialize in implementing, configuring, troubleshooting, and maintaining Xactly's sales performance infrastructure will scour your system to pinpoint the root causes of your solution performance issues.
A technology health check is not a simple platform evaluation or repair service. It also isn’t just someone logging in, clicking around, and giving vague feedback about “best practices.”
A real Technical Health Check is meant to be diagnostic. It’s a way to identify what is happening in the system today, why it’s happening, and what that means for your ability to operate incentive compensation at scale.
If you are working with the right IT systems experts, at the end of the process, the output is actionable, meaning it identifies what’s broken, why it’s broken, and what options exist to fix it.
Not every Xactly Corp customer needs an IT Health Check. But those who are experiencing consistent growing pains are good candidates for operational sales management professional services.
Contrary to popular opinion, the difference between a healthy environment and a failing one isn't controlled by the age of your Xactly infrastructure. While time is certainly a factor, real differentiators are complexity, trust, and operational strain.
In other words, it’s less about whether your Xactly environment is old and more about whether your organization has outgrown the way your intelligent revenue platform was originally built.
Here are the 14 most common factors that determine whether a IT health check is likely to be worth the investment.
A Technical Health Check is not something every Xactly customer should do automatically.
In many organizations, Xactly is working exactly as intended. The system is stable, the team is operating efficiently, and comp outcomes are trusted. While the odd issue might crop up every once in a while, there are no consistent, recurring problems. In those cases, a THC may be unnecessary, and it may not generate meaningful ROI. Simple asset management or repair services from your internal IT resources are sufficient.
But for organizations that are experiencing consistent operational strain, rising disputes, increasing manual work, or technical instability, a THC can be one of the highest-leverage investments you can make. It helps restore incentive compensation to what it should be: controlled infrastructure that scales with the business.
Still not sure where you fall? Let's take a closer look:
You likely do not need an expert review from a THC provider if your environment is stable, your pay cycles are predictable, and your organization trusts the outputs.
You may not need a health check if the primary issues you’re experiencing aren't technical. For example, if the comp plan itself is misaligned, overly complex, or constantly changing without governance, a technical assessment won’t solve the root cause.
Finally, if your organization is not prepared to act on findings, whether due to budget, leadership alignment, or internal capacity, a THC can become a report that sits on a shelf, even if it’s accurate.
A THC is typically worth the investment when the organization has reached a point where incentive compensation is creating operational cost, payout risk, or trust erosion, and when leadership is ready to stabilize the environment.
In practice, the strongest candidates for a technical health check are organizations where Sales Ops has become the system, where Finance has lost confidence in payout accuracy, where disputes are increasing, and where technical complexity has outgrown the original architecture.
If your team is spending more time validating, correcting, and explaining commissions than actually running compensation operations, the system is already telling you what you need to know. A Technical Health Check is simply the structured way to confirm it and map the most realistic path forward.
In some cases, organizations choose to expand the scope beyond the technical review to include a broader process assessment (for example, evaluating how compensation operations are run across teams, systems, and workflows).
When these service expansions are included, pricing can vary depending on the size and complexity of the organization—and whether we’re assessing compensation only, or additional related processes as well.
While this provides you with a general estimate, it's only part of the equation. A THC isn’t just something you “buy.” It’s something your organization participates in. And, as with most diagnostic work, the ROI depends heavily on how prepared you are to use the results.
Here's a more comprehensive breakdown of costs:
The most obvious cost is the engagement itself.
A meaningful technical health check requires skilled Xactly specialists, not just general SPM experience, because the root causes often live in the technical details: calculation logic design, data model structure, integration strategy, and operational workflow design.
There are different levels of THC depth. A lightweight THC can identify surface-level issues quickly. A deeper THC costs more, but produces outputs that are far more actionable.
Both can be valid, but they solve different problems.
Even the best THC cannot be performed in a vacuum.
Internal stakeholders will need to spend time supporting discovery sessions, sharing documentation, walking through payroll cycles, validating data flows, and reviewing sample payout scenarios.
This is where some THCs fail, not because the technical work is wrong, but because the organization underestimated how much internal context is required to diagnose the right issues.
If your team is already overwhelmed, this internal cost is real, and it should be included in the analysis.
A technical health check doesn’t typically disrupt payroll cycles directly, but it does introduce a new type of work.
It requires stakeholders to slow down enough to answer technical questions, revisit assumptions, and sometimes confront the fact that the system they've been relying on isn’t doing what people think it is.
For some organizations, that disruption is productive. For others, it can feel like added pressure during an already strained period.
This is the most important cost to acknowledge:
A THC is only valuable if the organization is willing to act on the findings. A well-run THC will surface root causes, risk areas, and remediation paths. But it cannot create alignment. It cannot create a budget. It cannot force change.
If leadership wants answers but doesn’t want remediation work, the THC becomes a document that sits in a folder while the same problems continue.
That doesn’t mean the THC was wrong. It means the organization wasn’t ready.
Ultimately, to do the math properly, you need to factor in both costs and returns to get your ROI. This is where the analysis gets interesting. The value of a technical health check is in reduced risk, stabilized payout operations, and restored trust in incentive compensation.
Here are the most meaningful benefit categories, including the measurable ones and the harder-to-quantify ones that are often more impactful.
In broken incentive systems, overpayments are more common than most organizations realize. Not because anyone is trying to game the system, but because manual adjustments, exceptions, and poorly governed plan logic tend to skew in the rep’s favor over time.
This is especially true when Sales Ops is under pressure to get payroll out, and the system isn’t producing reliable results on its own.
A THC helps uncover issues like:
Most teams don’t measure this, but it’s one of the clearest ROI levers.
A healthy Xactly environment should reduce the time spent on manual reconciliation, dispute investigations, spreadsheet validation, statement explanations, and rework caused by late plan changes.
When the system is broken, those hours quietly become “normal.” People stop noticing how much effort is being burned just to keep commissions moving.
A technical health check can quantify where time is being lost and why, and identify which fixes will actually reduce workload rather than simply shift it.
Finance teams care about Xactly for a simple reason: Commissions hit the P&L.
If payouts are unpredictable, late, or constantly adjusted after the fact, Finance loses confidence in accrual accuracy, forecasting, quarter-close timelines, and auditability.
Even if commissions are “close enough,” the lack of control creates downstream friction. A THC can produce measurable improvements in financial governance, even if the sales org is the loudest stakeholder.
This benefit is real, but hard to quantify. That said, most sales leaders recognize the second-order effects when reps don’t trust commissions:
They stop chasing the right behaviors. They spend time doing their own calculations. They disengage from comp as a motivator. They escalate disputes aggressively.
When incentives are unclear, performance drops, even if you can’t tie it neatly to a single metric. One of the most underappreciated benefits of fixing incentive infrastructure is simply restoring confidence that effort will be rewarded correctly.
If your organization is public, regulated, or simply under heavier audit scrutiny, a THC can prevent major pain. Incentive compensation touches financial reporting accuracy, broker compensation controls, and, in many organizations, SOX controls.
A technical health check can identify gaps before they become audit findings.
This benefit is hard to quantify, but it’s huge. Organizations often know something is wrong, but they aren't sure if:
- whether it’s configuration, integrations, or process
- whether they need optimization or reimplementation
- whether the problem is Xactly or the upstream data
- whether the issue is technical debt or plan design
A technical health check replaces guesswork with clarity. And clarity reduces wasted spending.
A THC tends to be high-ROI when the environment is materially broken, payroll cycles consume significant manual effort, leadership is prepared to fund remediation, and there are real payout errors or audit concerns.
It also tends to be high-ROI when the organization is growing or restructuring, because incentive infrastructure that is “barely holding together” rarely survives the next major change.
A THC tends to be low-ROI when the organization only wants validation, not change, or when there is no capacity to act on findings.
It’s also low-ROI when the problem is primarily compensation strategy, not infrastructure. A THC won’t fix a comp plan that is misaligned, overly complex, or incentivizing the wrong behaviors. That’s a governance issue, not a technical one.
A technical health check is only useful if the assessor has sufficient depth to identify real root causes and sufficient independence to be honest about what they find.
There are three main options:
This can work if you have a highly experienced Xactly admin, strong technical documentation, and enough time and authority to challenge existing assumptions.
The biggest downside is that internal teams are often too close to the system. They may know it deeply, but they may not have seen enough environments to recognize deeper structural issues, or to confidently recommend the best remediation path.
Vendor-led THCs can be valuable, particularly when the issues are known and isolated, and the goal is to validate platform-specific best practices.
However, vendor teams may not always take responsibility for messy real-world integrations, upstream data problems, or operational design. In many organizations, those are the exact areas where the biggest risks live.
This is often the best fit when the environment is deeply customized, has evolved over multiple years, or is showing signs of technical debt.
A specialized partner is also more likely to provide remediation-ready recommendations: meaning prioritized fixes, realistic effort estimates, and a path forward that doesn’t automatically require a full rebuild.
In other words, a specialist technical health check provider will do more than just uncover what’s wrong, but also describe what you should do next, and why.
A Technical Health Check is worth the investment when your Xactly environment is producing measurable operational cost, payout risk, or trust erosion, and when leadership is prepared to act on the results.
It’s not worth it when the system is healthy, when the organization is not prepared for remediation, or when the core issues are unrelated to infrastructure.
Once you’ve identified where the system is failing, the next question is: What’s the tangible value of fixing it?
Many organizations underestimate the operational and financial impact of misaligned incentive structures. Lost quota, overpayments, and reduced rep motivation often go unmeasured until they compound.
Canidium’s Xactly specialists help Sales and Finance teams model the expected gains from system improvements, accounting for complexity, adoption, and cross-functional dependencies. Our goal is to help you understand what preparation and planning are required to implement changes successfully, and whether a Technical Health Check is the right first step.
Learn more about the implementation process here.