Sales Ops teams don’t need to be told that incentive compensation management is complicated. You already know. You live it.

You live it every month-end. At the end of every quarter. Every time a comp plan changes mid-year. Every time someone in leadership says, “This should be a simple update.” Every time a sales rep Slacks you with a “quick question” that takes up the rest of your day.

And if Xactly Incent is already in place, but your Sales Operations team still feels like you’re constantly drowning in manual work, escalations, and payout anxiety, here’s the part that’s easy to miss:

The issue usually isn’t the comp plan. And it’s not your team’s effort, either. It’s your Xactly infrastructure. Not Xactly itself, but the way it's installed, configured, and embedded in your overall system.

When Xactly Incent is properly configured and maintained, it becomes the stabilizing, intelligent revenue platform it was meant to be. It keeps your incentive compensation plan and sales operations predictable. It scales cleanly as sales team headcount grows. It creates audit trails Finance can trust. It reduces disputes. It gives reps visibility into earnings during the sales process. It makes compensation and revenue operations run with confidence.

But when the underlying Xactly configuration is poorly done, fragile, or simply hasn’t been maintained as your business evolves, Xactly stops working for you. In fact, it may feel like it's working against you.

If all this sounds familiar, this guide is for you.

Here's how to: 

• Discover if your Xactly infrastructure is the problem.
• Define the costs of the misconfigurations in your system.
• Diagnose what's wrong with your overall sales performance management infrastructure.
• Determine your next steps.

How to Tell If Your Xactly Infrastructure is Broken

Most Sales Operations teams don’t set out to build a complicated commission and quota management process. It usually starts with good intentions: implement Xactly, automate calculations, reduce disputes, and finally get incentive compensation out of spreadsheets for good. And for a while, it works.

But as the business grows, plans evolve, territories shift, and exceptions pile up, something subtle happens. The system doesn’t “break” in a dramatic way. There’s no outage. No flashing warning light. No moment where someone says, “Xactly is down.”

Instead, Xactly keeps running, and Sales Operations quietly absorbs the gaps.

That’s why one of the clearest ways to tell if your Xactly Incent infrastructure is broken is to look less at what the system is doing and more at what your team has been forced to do around it during and after sales workflows.

If Sales Operations has become the glue holding compensation together, that’s not normal. That’s a structural signal. And it’s usually the first sign that your Xactly environment isn’t configured, governed, or integrated in a way that can actually scale with the revenue operations or sales strategy performance management goals of your business.

Here are the two most common indicators that your Xactly Incent Suite is misconfigured:

1. The Most Common Symptom: Sales Ops Becomes the System

In a healthy incentive compensation environment, Sales Operations runs the process. In a broken one, Sales Ops becomes the process.

Instead of managing sales compensation operations, you’re doing everything around it: pulling reports that should already exist, rebuilding logic in spreadsheets just to validate what the system is calculating during sales processes and payouts, all while creating manual adjustments that shouldn’t be necessary and spending hours investigating issues you shouldn’t be dealing with in the first place.

You become the translator between sales teams, finance, and IT—the human layer of validation — and the buffer between the rep population and a commission calculations sales engagement tool they don’t trust. Plus, you’re doing all of this while still being measured on speed, accuracy, and sales rep satisfaction.

 In other words, if sales operations are taking the heat because your sales performance management system is messing up, that's the first and most prominent indicator that your Xactly Incent isn't properly embedded within your system. 

2. Broken Xactly Infrastructure Usually Doesn’t Look “Broken” Outside of Sales Operations

Here’s what makes this so tricky: most organizations don’t realize their Xactly infrastructure is broken, because the system is still technically working. Commissions are still being calculated. Payouts are still being processed. Reports are still being generated for sales management. On paper, everything is “fine.”

 This is why sales operations are the canary in the coal mine. While your company's commission and incentive plan management appears stable, behind the scenes, the system is fragile, and your Sales Operations team is holding it together with a patchwork of manual workarounds and tribal knowledge. 

It’s the spreadsheet exports you run every cycle because Xactly reporting isn’t giving you the sales data you need. It’s the logic you re-check manually because you can't rely on automated sales processes. It’s the fact that only one person on the sales operations team knows how it all works, and everything falls apart when they're not there.

 If your incentive compensation operations require heroics, you don’t have a scalable sales enablement system. You have a fragile one. 

What Does Broken Xactly Incent Infrastructure Cost You?

If you’re in Sales Operations, you don’t need a spreadsheet to tell you this is expensive.

You feel the cost every month-end when comp turns into a scramble. You feel it every time a payout issue becomes a dispute with the sales team. You feel it when a plan change that should take an hour turns into a week of manual workarounds, validations, and escalations.

But to get leadership to invest in resolving broken Xactly Incent infrastructure for sales operations, you need to be able to articulate what this costs your organization as a whole.

What makes broken Xactly Incent infrastructure so dangerous is that the true cost doesn’t appear in a single place. It shows up everywhere: in sales team trust, in Finance risk, in sales manager confidence, and eventually in the people who are holding the entire system together.

The Real Cost of a Broken Sales Management System Isn’t Just Time. It’s Sales Team Trust.

Sales Operations usually sees the cost of broken infrastructure in their workload. However, the higher costs reverberate far beyond operational sales management, impacting trust throughout the organization and, in some cases, customer relationships.

The entire point of incentive compensation management is to drive successful sales behaviors. It's not just an operational sales enablement function. It’s deeply emotional. It affects sales professionals' income. It affects their confidence in sales operations. It affects whether they believe leadership is running a fair business.

When reps don’t trust their commission payouts, it doesn’t stay contained inside the comp process. It spills into everything: motivation drops, behavior misaligns with the sales strategy, top performers get frustrated, the sales pipeline suffers, and ultimately, people stop believing the plan administration is real.

How Broken Sales Planning Solutions Impact Finance: The Audit Risk

Misconfigured compensation plans aren't just a problem for sales reps. When Finance doesn’t trust Xactly outputs, you lose auditability, confidence in accruals, and speed at close. The comp process is becoming a liability rather than a controlled system.

Moreover, when leadership doesn’t trust the operational sales management system, you lose strategic agility. Comp plan optimization becomes impossible for sales operations as it can no longer evolve the existing system, incentive sales quota attainment becomes less credible, and the sales cycle time becomes slower to respond when the business changes.

When nobody trusts the system, Sales Operations becomes the human shield. The team that absorbs the chaos and makes it “work” anyway.

That’s why broken infrastructure always leads to burnout. Not because Sales Ops isn’t capable, but because no team should be forced to operate inside sales technologies that are structurally unstable.

The Hidden Cost of Broken Commission Expense Management Processes: Burnout

Here’s the part most organizations underestimate: broken infrastructure doesn’t just create extra work for sales operations teams. It creates sustained overextension.

And overextension caused by a misconfigured sales tech stack is one of the fastest ways to burn out the exact teams you can’t afford to lose: sales ops, revops, comp admins, and the sales operations managers who are stuck firefighting alongside them.

This is also where the cost becomes measurable in a way that Finance and leadership can’t ignore. Research shows that employee disengagement, overextension, ineffectiveness, and burnout over the course of one year costs employers an average of:

$3,999 per non-managerial hourly employee

$4,257 per non-managerial salaried employee

$10,824 per manager

$20,683 per executive

And at a typical 1,000-person company, burnout-related disengagement drives an estimated $5.04 million in annual costs.

That’s not a soft cost. That’s a real business impact that reverberates out from sales operations to impact multiple departments.

Incentive compensation sales planning is one of those functions where burnout compounds quickly, because sales productivity work is high-stakes, time-sensitive, and emotionally charged. When the system is unstable, Sales Ops isn’t just doing extra work; you’re doing extra work under pressure, with visibility, and with blame attached.

That’s why broken Xactly Incent infrastructure always leads to burnout. Not because Sales Ops isn’t capable, but because no team should be forced to operate inside a sales planning system that’s structurally unstable.

Diagnosing The Broken Infrastructure in Your Xactly Configuration

When people say “Xactly is broken,” they often assume the software itself is the issue. But in most cases, the platform is doing exactly what it was told to do.

The problem is that it wasn’t told to do the right thing.

Broken infrastructure in Xactly is almost always a configuration, architecture, and governance issue. It’s what happens when the system was originally set up for a smaller business, a simpler comp plan, or a different operating model, and then it never got rebuilt as complexity in commission payments, territory planning, sales forecast scenarios, and overall revenue performance management grew.

Over time, cracks form. And Sales Ops is the team that has to deal with them first. While the solutions to your specific problems are likely a unique result of the errors in your Xactly implementation, here are four common reasons systems go wrong:

1. The Quiet Root Cause: Data That Doesn’t Match the Real Business

Incentive compensation and commission systems are only as good as the data flowing into them. If your Xactly Connect or Incent sales data feeds are inconsistent, incomplete, or poorly mapped, everything downstream starts to suffer. You can have the cleanest comp plan logic in the world, and it won’t matter if the inputs are unstable.

This is one of the most common reasons Sales Ops ends up spending hours reconciling data before comp can even be calculated. Maybe credits don’t align with the way opportunities are structured in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, or sales territory building isn't reflected correctly. Perhaps your product hierarchies don’t match finance's sales reports, or split logic is being handled outside the sales performance management system because it was never modeled properly inside it.

In those situations, Xactly becomes the end of a messy pipeline instead of the system that brings structure to it. And Sales Ops becomes the reconciliation team.

2. The Slow Degradation of Comp Plan Logic

A lot of Xactly environments evolve the same way. They start with one plan. Then the business adds a special rule. Then an exception. Then another exception. Then a workaround for the workaround. And that cycle repeats for years.

Eventually, comp plan logic becomes something sales operations cannot confidently explain. It becomes difficult to test. Risky to change. Dependent on a few power users who know the history behind every odd edge case in sales cycles, sales targets, customer journeys, and sales plans.

This is usually the moment Sales Ops starts dreading comp plan changes, even when the business desperately needs them to improve sales metrics. Because you’re not just updating a plan. Sales operations are touching a fragile structure that could break everything.

3. Running Comp and Fixing the Xactly System at the Same Time

In a lot of organizations, Sales Ops gets stuck doing two jobs at once. You’re expected to run incentive compensation month-to-month, but you’re also expected to fix Xactly's misconfigured automated incentive compensation management while you do it.

That creates a constant state of emergency.

There’s never enough breathing room to address root cause, let alone rebuild a broken component or redesign the comp plan logic for maintainability. So, sales operations end up in an endless loop:

Fix the payout. Patch the issue. Repeat next month. (Graphic or interactive element in Hubspot)

It’s not sustainable, and it’s not what Xactly was designed for. Moreover, over time, quick patches accumulate, and compounded errors further degrade operational efficiency. In other words, as time goes on, a misconfigured system will only grow more and more convoluted.

3. Xactly Reporting That Doesn’t Match What Stakeholders Need

Xactly can produce powerful reporting, but only if the underlying structure supports it. If your reporting process requires exports and Excel manipulation every cycle, that’s rarely a “reporting problem.” It’s usually a signal that the system isn’t modeled cleanly.

The result is predictable: Sales Ops becomes the sales intelligence reporting engine too. At this point, you’re not just responsible for payouts. You’re responsible for creating visibility across the business, with a process that feels more like hand-built analytics (which should and could be managed by Xactly) than operational infrastructure.

4. The Most Overlooked Issue: Governance and Ownership

This is the problem that gets missed the most, and it’s often the most damaging. Xactly isn’t a “set it and forget it” incentive compensation platform. In fact, cloud-based enterprise software of any type almost always requires maintenance and monitoring.

Xactly is unique in that its highly user-friendly interface allows companies to achieve self-sufficiency with the platform. However, ongoing regular maintenance and updates are still required. It needs governance. It needs a clear operating model.

Someone has to own the comp plan logic changes. Someone has to own Xactly data feed validation. Someone has to own the testing. Someone has to sign off on payout readiness. Someone has to manage ongoing optimization.

Without that structure, the system degrades over time.

Not because the team is careless, but because businesses evolve constantly. New products get launched. Territories shift. Roles change. Comp plans become more complex. Systems get integrated. Reporting requirements grow. If Xactly isn’t governed like operational infrastructure, it eventually becomes a patchwork of old assumptions.

And Sales Ops is the team forced to navigate the consequences.

The Tipping Point: When Workarounds Become the Standard

Most Sales Ops teams don’t wake up one day and decide to build manual processes. They build them because they have to. But over time, those workarounds become normalized. They become “just how things work.”

“This is how we do splits.”

“This is how we handle SPIFs.”

“This is how we validate payouts.”

“This is how we fix exceptions.”

Eventually, your incentive compensation process is no longer Xactly. It’s a web of spreadsheets, exports, Slack threads, one-off adjustments, undocumented rules, and last-minute reconciliations. At that point, the platform isn’t reducing complexity. It’s just sitting next to it.

What Sales Operations Should Do Instead of “Working Harder”

If this article feels a little too familiar, here’s the good news: You may not need a full Xactly reimplementation. In most cases, organizations can restore stability and dramatically reduce manual effort with targeted improvements.

That might mean fixing data architecture and integrations, redesigning comp plan logic for maintainability, rebuilding key components that have degraded over time, establishing governance and testing workflows, and cleaning up reporting and audit readiness.

The key is diagnosing where the breakdown actually is. Because once you find the structural issue, the fix is often much smaller than you’d expect.

The First Step Toward Solving Xactly Infrastructure Issues

If this feels uncomfortably familiar, it’s usually a sign that the issue isn’t your sales ops effort or execution; it’s structural. The next step isn’t to work harder or add more manual workarounds, but to identify where the breakdown is actually occurring.

Odds are, you’re working twice as hard and half as efficiently trying to get around a misconfigured system. A simple fix to your Xactly infrastructure could make all the difference.

In many cases, a focused adjustment to your Xactly infrastructure—not a full overhaul—is enough to restore clarity and reduce friction. Learn how to fix a broken system here.

How do you fix a misconfigured Xactly system?

Learn how to spot and treat broken incentive compensation management solutions here