Case Study: National Instruments achieves real-time incentive visibility and proactive plan management with Xactly Corporation

National Instruments Visualizes Growth with Xactly

National Instruments, an Austin-based technology company serving over 35,000 customers with a global field and inside sales force, redesigned its quota-based incentive plans for 2015 but lacked automated reporting and metrics to track plan performance. With reporting previously manual and labor-intensive, they engaged Xactly Strategic Services—having already deployed Xactly Incent—to create a scalable way to monitor and evaluate incentive plan effectiveness.

Xactly’s Plan Design Support used Xactly Analytics and Xactly Insights to build dashboards and five custom reports, plus a quarterly review cadence, enabling daily-updated, filterable views by role, geography, and plan. The tools revealed a left-shifted quota distribution (prompting midyear quota adjustments), uncovered outsized commission payouts tied to misaligned sales cycles, and identified performance outliers for targeted action—giving National Instruments ongoing visibility to improve quota setting, fairness, and data-driven compensation decisions.

National Instruments