Finland-based Amer Sports Corporation offers a portfolio of some of the world’s leading sporting goods brands, including Atomic (snow sports), Salomon (trail running, hiking, and snow sports), Wilson (racket sports, golf, and team sports), Suunto (sport watches), Mavic (cycling), and Arc’teryx (outdoor activities). The company is always looking for better ways to innovate, both in the products, it offers to consumers and in its organisational processes so that it can better serve consumers and more effectively compete.

By consolidating targets worldwide using the Anaplan platform, Amer Sports standardized target-setting around the globe instituted best practices and restructured its sales team to create smarter, more specialised sales roles. With Anaplan, Amer Sports now hits its goals.

Global Sales Development Manager

A global company that oversees some of the world’s most well-known sporting goods brands, Amer Sports struggled with setting sales targets and rewarding salespeople consistently across its many brands and regions. As the company grew and diversified, it wanted to standardise target-setting so that local targets met global sales objectives, and revamp its team to address the company’s diverse customer base.

In the past, all sales planning and compensation management was done locally on spreadsheets, some of which had grown so large that they took seven minutes to open. There was no way to confirm the accuracy of the data, consolidate data across regions, or view global performance by brand or season.

Working alongside the Anaplan services team, Amer Sports built and launched its initial Anaplan for Sales model in under 40 business days. The model allowed the Amer Sports team to construct sales targets, create incentive plans, and calculate bonuses for salespeople worldwide. The model also ensured that consolidated bottom-up sales targets set locally would always align with top-down expectations.

Anaplan also enabled Amer Sports to create multiple new sales roles, knowing that each role would automatically inherit the appropriate quota and compensation plan. This helped Amer Sports transition the team into more specialised jobs, including area sales managers, smart service sales reps, visual merchandisers, and tech reps.

Using Anaplan, Amer Sports reduced the time it spent on target-setting by an estimated 70 percent. Planning processes that previously took one week now take less than one day. Because Anaplan automatically compiles data from multiple sources, Amer Sports no longer needs analysts in each country to extract data from the company’s SAP system and rework it into spreadsheets.

Other benefits include:

• Sales targets are standardised globally
• Sales data is viewable across multiple dimensions, including territory, brand, account, and season
• Sellers use predictive analytics to forecast projected compensation earnings
• Sales roles easily realigned to accommodate new selling strategies

Amer Sports selected Anaplan for its flexibility in handling complex information and its ability to implement consistency across dispersed teams and locations. The company is looking for ways to extend its solutions and anticipates building a territory-planning model. The team lives by the mantra of setting “demanding but achievable targets” and insists that because the Anaplan platform is so flexible, anything is possible.

INDUSTRIES
Consumer Goods & Retail

SOLUTION

• Sales planning
• Sales compensation