Xactly

Advanced Lead-Gen Powered by Layout Builder & Drupal

Xactly, the leading sales and performance management SaaS provider, was stuck on a proprietary CMS with no room to grow. The solution? A new go-to-market strategy, brand refresh, and Drupal 8 migration to lay the groundwork for future growth.

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Xactly is on the cutting edge of sales strategy. Incentive and compensation management, along with territory planning and machine learning predictive reporting, are tools most organizations don’t even know exist, let alone know they need. These poor souls are in, as Xactly likes to describe it as, “spreadsheet hell.” Understanding that our target customers were like Dante—trapped in the seven layers of pivot tables—we needed to help Xactly be the Beatrice to lead them to the promised land.

Everyone Menu is a Journey

 Allegory aside, our challenge was to connect with novice customers, educate them on what’s possible today with Xactly’s software, and steer them down a path to conversion. A spectrum of maturity aligned the products and solutions with companies in different stages, from early adopters to sophisticated power users. But how do you speak to a freshman and Ph.D. without knowing who is who?

Much of our work centered around honing and presenting Xactly’s evolving product architecture in a clear way. A push towards enterprise (without alienating SMBs) meant presenting solutions plainly—no acronyms or trade names allowed. A jobs-to-be-done, or problem-first approach, connected what problems users have with instead of products on the shelf for them to choose.

But for people who know what they need, products are still readily available and better organized with contextual information along with branded terms. This style of menu presentation helps users preview the entire section of a site without “risking a click” on irrelevant information.

X MARKS THE SPOT

At the same time, we were mapping our user experience, Xactly was working through an internal brand effort to sharpen their overall look. We took type cues and overall digital concepts and went big...real big. Bold strokes and colors capture attention where needed, and soften where detailed reading is critical. But going big doesn’t mean we forget about maintainability or site performance. Auto-cropping and scaling images, reusable assets, and scalable SVG graphics are all built-in for marketing teams to use.

BUILDING LAYOUTS BETTER

Xactly is a SaaS leader, so their Drupal site needed to reflect their sophistication. Drupal 8’s newest major enhancement, Layout Builder, is a block component drag-and-drop editor that takes the editing experience even further, competing with UI-only platforms such as Squarespace in terms of ease of use. We’ve incorporated Layout Builder into our Paragon Drupal base build which gives companies an impressive starting toolset from day one.

Xactly’s marketers can drop regions, rearrange blocks and edit content inline. No more edit form-change-save-repeat in order to tweak. Layout builder allows admins to move faster with more flexibility, while still maintaining good content standards and fielded data on the backend.

MARKETO MEETS DRUPAL

Xactly struggled with the Mura headless CMS due to its lack of flexibility for administrators to have control over component-based content. Faster content deployment for product and lead-gen landing pages was essential, and Drupal would provide robust, long-term flexibility and allow Xactly to adapt and change over time.

IMMEDIATE RESULTS

When the digital dust settles and data starts coming in, we’re always anxious to measure performance goals. KPIs around lead generation, meaningful content engagement, and overall site performance are, well, key.

From the outset, an impressive 92% increase in demo requests (our primary conversion) is a good indicator things working. 

But the work of optimization is never done. Analyzing user behavior, monitoring technical SEO, and site performance are all part of an ongoing strategy.

• 92% in request for demos
• 13% increase in phone calls.