Xactly Releases New Findings: “The State of Gender Equality in Sales”

Study finds that women perform better overall, but see lower compensation on average than men in the same role and industry


SAN JOSE, Calif., April 02, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Xactly the leading innovator of cloud-based sales performance management (SPM) software, today released key findings from its State of Gender Equality in Sales report, which reveals new insights about the pay gap between men and women within sales organizations across 13 industries. The study is based on anonymized and aggregated Xactly data pulled from hundreds of companies and more than 100,000 employees’ salaries and commissions based on gender, ranging from associate to managerial positions. The data shows that despite being underrepresented in sales roles across nearly all industries, women tend to hit or exceed their quotas, but are paid less in salary and commissions over time. The report was first released in 2014, and offers evidence that this pay gap worsens over time: as employees progress through their careers, men are more likely to find themselves in executive positions with bigger paychecks than their female counterparts.

The industries analyzed in the report include: Business Services, Communications, Consumer Goods, Financial Services, Healthcare, High-Tech Manufacturing, Life Science & Pharma, Manufacturing, Media & Internet, Medical Devices, SaaS & Cloud Software, and Travel & Hospitality.

Highlights from the Xactly “State of Gender Equality in Sales” Report include:

  • The gender pay gap persists, particularly in technology. Across the SaaS & Cloud Software industry, men are paid more over time, despite women matching or exceeding quotas of their male counterparts. The gap illustrates that women’s commissions tend to level off while men’s commissions keep rising well above six figures.
  • Women-led teams perform better. Teams led by women tend to have higher win and attainment rates (94 percent) compared with male-led teams (91 percent).
  • Representation of women at managerial levels is lagging. The average representation of female sales managers is 26 percent across industries. Within industries like Healthcare and Travel & Hospitality, the percentage of women in leadership roles rises to 59 percent and 72 percent respectively. Manufacturing, Communications, and Technology have the lowest representation of women at the managerial level.
  • The pay gap increases as women progress in their careers. Based on median salary across industries women in direct sales roles (Account Executive) earn 22 percent less compared to their male counterparts.  However, with women in leadership roles, the pay gap widens to 25 percent.

“We originally released this report in 2014, and the consistent takeaway remains that women outperform men when it comes to winning deals and hitting their quotas, and they are not paid equally. In fact, many industries today still have incredibly low representation of women across their sales departments,” said Chris Cabrera, Founder and CEO of Xactly. “At Xactly, we use this data to ensure that we provide fair pay for men and women with the same experience across the entire company, and are diligently working to increase the representation of women in sales leadership roles. The findings of the report shed a light on the areas where sales organizations can and must improve, and serves as a reminder to all companies that we still have a lot of work to do to reduce gender bias in the broader workplace.”

Full report will be issued at Xactly Unleashed. Learn from the experts about how you  can bridge the pay gap in your organization at Xactly Unleashed, register now and get a discount.

About Xactly
Xactly delivers a scalable, cloud-based enterprise platform for planning and incenting sales organizations, including sales quota and territory planning, incentive compensation management, and predictive analytics. Using this powerful sales performance management (SPM) portfolio, customers mitigate risk, accelerate sales performance, and increase business agility. Combined with Xactly Insights™-- the industry’s only empirical big data platform, Xactly empowers companies with real-time compensation insights and benchmarking data that maximize the bottom line. With an open, standards-based architecture, Xactly seamlessly integrates within an enterprise’s existing infrastructure, with the ability to work with any ERP, CRM, or HCM application, while meeting the highest enterprise standards in security, reliability, and privacy.

©2019 Xactly Corporation. All rights reserved. Xactly, the Xactly logo, and “Inspire Performance” are registered trademarks or trademarks of Xactly Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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