Demo Video: Sales Performance Management

Use Anaplan for Sales to predict revenue, motivate the right sales behaviours, model future performance, and maximise selling time, all while keeping your organisation connected, flexible and prepared for the future.

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Transcript

[Music] Anaplan’s solution for Sales Performance Management or SPM centres around the idea that we can use a connected planning platform to help organisations chart the path to revenue and commercial success. So, what is connected planning? Well, Anaplan’s cloud-based platform connects the data, pulling data in from different sources, mainly internal, but also external. Bringing them all into one place. Connected planning connects the people and connects the processes. So, we’ll have different people in the organisation doing different things, but if we can all work from the same data and all collaborate, work together to achieve our endpoint of our processes, then we are truly doing connected planning within the organisation.

As far as visualising the concept of connected planning, we find the honeycomb concept that we see here really useful. Of course, the individual parts of the organisation operate their own distinct processes, but these processes are naturally interdependent and connected to other areas of the business. And using a cloud planning tool like Anaplan provides for each process to happen but also provides for that connection between different parts of the organisation and within an individual function itself.

So, what does that look like? When we think about a process flow of a plan and data coming into plan, and Anaplan models providing the relevant output that we need to make those better decisions in the business. If we look on the left-hand side here with data sources, we’re pulling data in from wherever it resides in the organisation – the data we need for planning. That might come from other cloud sources, it might come from relational data, it might come from CSV or Excel. We’ve got the ability to transform that data, and then we propose best practice of creating a data hub within your Anaplan environment. What that means then is you’ve got one set of verified data coming into Anaplan, and then we’ve got those connected planning models that we see branching off from that data. Whether you’re doing sales forecasting, incentive compensation, territory, and quota, not shown here as models but equally applicable, then everybody’s using the same set of data. There’s no discussion over who’s got the right set or who’s got the most up-to-date set of data. Equally, if you’ve got, for example, a team doing sales forecasting in Anaplan, there’s a good chance that there’s going to be input required from demand planning. There’s going to be data that needs to flow into FP&A. So that’s really truly what connected planning means, to achieve the commercial goals.

Organisations must set corporate goals, translate these corporate goals into market plans or go-to-market plans, create performance levers that drive motivation to reach the desired outcomes, and have processes in place that promote sales excellence. Bringing these processes into this single cloud-based platform makes a huge difference. A connected planning approach that enables the three elements of connection that we talked about above: connecting the data, connecting the people, and connecting the processes.

If we look at the corporate goals and go-to-market strategy first, this is the sales planning process. Using Anaplan to create balanced territories and quotas, define market segments, eliminate coverage gaps, and develop capacity plans. We can do this with Anaplan because we have current, regularly updated data. We have access to history, e.g., win rate, deal velocity, discounting, and so forth. We can interface with internal data sources and bring in external data as well. And we have the capability to change on the fly as these internal and external factors change. So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at the territory and quota planning app that we have open on the landing page in front of us.

Now, we’re logging in as somebody who’s got absolute access to everything. However, in reality, we’re bringing together a group of people. We’re connecting those people who might be involved in different elements of this overall app to generate those quotas, align them, approve them, set up the territories, and so forth. We’ll see… Let’s start off with sales history. So, we’re bringing in data into our application that’s our external, our internal data, but also potentially our external data. Very importantly here, we’re starting to think about not only bringing in our historic prior-year sales against our accounts and looking at total addressable market for our existing accounts and maybe target accounts. But we’re also starting to score those accounts in a couple of ways – maybe a more simple firmographic approach to scoring our accounts, but also taking a more scientific approach using Anaplan’s predictive insights to score accounts as well.

So, if we think about that, we’re using predictive insights to identify the ideal customer profile, to score and prioritise, and to identify new prospects to target. So that’s a good example there of bringing internal and external data together in Anaplan for that planning process. We’re now thinking about goal setting in this application. So, we’re taking our historic data, we’re taking our predictive spends, our total addressable market, and then ultimately generating a target which we’re then going to push down to the region, further down to sub-region, then ultimately down to an account level with approval levels at each stage of that process.

So, if we just jump in and look at the regional goal setting, we’re taking a target for the Americas and then spreading it out further down to the US, each US South. If we now go down to the sub-region, we can see how we’re taking that same US target for the US East and pushing that out between these three sub-regions. Ultimately, it goes right down, the target goes right down here for the Northeast for this particular product of FY21. For the forecast, we’re now down to an account level. So, we’ve set our targets, we need to now be sure that we’ve got the resources in place to achieve those targets.

If I look at my geo capacity analysis screen here, I’m looking at US East for my key accounts and forecasts. I can see I’ve got two heads approved, which I can add into the relevant positions that are going to achieve the most benefit for us. We can see down here in my coverage, capacity, and gaps, I’ve got a coverage gap down here in the Northeast. We’re working out then what’s the potential impact of adding a new head to this particular area. So, we might then want to consider, let’s put one of our heads in that area because that’s going to help us to start filling that coverage gap that we’re seeing here.

I also have the capability in the app to define those territories and make sure I’ve got the right people assigned to those territories. That might be key account assignment, it might be overlay assignment, it might be enterprise level. It’s also worth remembering here, we’re just looking at an example. How you decide to implement the exact requirements of your business is entirely down to your processes.

We look at the key account assignment here, we can see we’re bringing in alerting into the system here that we’ve got some key accounts which are under-assigned. We go to individual reps in the Northeast here, we can look at Tom, we can see all the accounts that have been assigned. We can even see here, for example, one of those assignments ending on the 30th of April that’s actually being handed over to Monica from the 1st of May onwards. So, great flexibility on how you assign those key accounts in this case.

Finally, in here, we want to have some element of workflow where we can finalise and sign off. So here we see our manager finalise quota and sign off. We’re looking at an individual rep level here. We’re just looking at the Northeast, and we can see, has it been reviewed? Does it need review? Are there any holds or overrides you want to put in place against those individual targets, against those individual reps?

The performance levers that we can use to reach our desired revenue targets are where Anaplan can give you a comprehensive incentive compensation modelling and reporting capability. Create plans, assign individuals to plans, track performance, manage disputes, as well as communicate this performance to both employees and managers, so there is no doubt of where performance has come from or where the gaps might be.

As with the sales planning process, we’re going to use data from different data sources, and we need the ability to adjust as required, as well as carry out what-if modelling to test the impact of making changes or the likely overall cost of a commission plan, for example. So, let’s take a closer look at the incentive compensation management app that we’re seeing now on the screen.

If we scroll down slightly, we can see here we’re dealing with the payees and also the managers. We’re giving visibility to payees and managers of where they are in terms of year-to-date achievement, also giving them access to history as well. Before that even happens, we, of course, need to create those plans. We need to create plans, assign individuals to those plans, and we’ve also got the capability to start thinking about, well, what if certain achievements are met? What’s that going to cost the business? And also giving that to the individuals to do the what-if modelling on their accounts to understand what they might be able to achieve as the year progresses.

We’re covering off the capability to have a disputes workspace. We are allowing overrides and adjustments to be made and also giving the payees and the managers full visibility of that information. Finally, then, we’re bringing in the workflow process once again here to carry out payment approvals, and then ultimately exporting a payroll file from Anaplan to payroll.

Of course, again, this is an example. The nuances of your process are absolutely capable of being modelled within Anaplan to fit your requirements. From a payee perspective, then, if we jump into that screen, we’re providing the payees full visibility of where they are, what they’ve achieved, what’s where they are in the current quarter. Here, we’re looking back at quarter one for one of our reps. Security will ensure that they only see their details. They’ve got some headline figures here. They’ve got a breakdown of where the credit has come from, and they can also jump into the real detail behind the attainment. In this case, for Q1, looking at the individual monthly performance, looking at the flow that takes them from their credits right down to the final pay-outs.

We’re managing and creating the plans in our application here too. Let’s just have a look at that. We can see here we’ve got a list of existing plans and the time periods over which they run. These are all approved in terms of workflow. Let’s focus on the strategic plan and jump forward now looking just at that strategic plan. We can see the inputs of that strategic plan, made up of these two elements down here. We might want to add further measures to the plan or review the existing measures we’ve got in our measures library going forward to the next. We want to think about the rate tables and maybe edit, manipulate the rate tables we’ve got attached to this quarterly revenue commission, which is part of the strategic element and also start to think about some what-if calculations.

Here, we’re looking at a concept of what would happen if we have seven million bookings here, what will the pay-out be based on my different tiers, and I can even flex those tiers as I need to. I’ve got data entry capabilities, so I can start thinking about changing those tiers and seeing what the impact that will have on the commission paid. We also need the ability to manage our credit rules and assignments. So, jumping in there, we see that we’re looking at individual reps. I’m focused on Tom here. I can see all of his accounts. He’s a strategic AE. We can see his hire date there. We can see the credit is rolling up to his manager as well. He’s got ten accounts. If, alternatively, we jump down, look at one of our overlays, we can see that Gabby is product-focused instead in the Northeast against these three products.

We, of course, need to be able to bring territory changes in from our territory and quota model that we looked at previously. So, we’ve got that connected nature that we can take output from one model in Anaplan and bring it into another. Finally then here in our incentive and comp application, let’s think about payment approvals. Over on the right-hand side, what we’re doing at this point is looking at total company or individual elements in the hierarchy. We’re looking at a point in time, and Anaplan has calculated the pay-outs. Using essentially a three-level approval process – auto-approve, tier group, where we might want to individually go in and approve or hold. Then there’s a must-review layer as well. We’re setting thresholds to decide how the different roles, what the lower and upper bounds will be for each of those stages of approval.

Ultimately, that then gives us the ability to easily focus on, for example, let’s focus on my must-review. I can see here there’s 7.74% above the target incentive, and that is a hold. I’ve put a hold on there. I’m commenting against that hold, so that can be visible then by anyone else who’s using the model who has relevant access to the model.

Finally, reaching our revenue goals is underpinned by a general desire for sales excellence through standardised forecasting methods, improved accuracy, better collaboration, and the ability for the business to develop contingency plans and, importantly, be able to implement across the organisation. Therefore, to be able to regularly check back to see how we are doing versus the plan and to readjust as required.

In our sales forecasting app then, we are trying to improve visibility by bringing time-based forecasting at an opportunity and stage level, with an ability to allow adjustments at different stages of the process by different levels in the organisation and bringing that all into one platform.

In this app, we’ve not only got a view of the history of what has happened at a good level of detail, but, of course, it’s a forecast. We’re looking forward. We’ve got the data here, we’ve got people involved in the process to give us a better view, a better prediction, a better view of the future, enabling us to react more quickly to changes, eliminating the number of surprises, reducing the number of surprises, allowing us to focus on what’s important.

We can see who’s closing, we can see what’s closing, we can see the best performance among different account executives. Let’s just take a look at some of the parts of the process here. So what we’re going to do is jump into our RVP review, RVP summary, and commit. We can see the RBP is focused on the Northeast. We’re looking at Q3 FY21. In terms of a version, we’re looking at the current week, but you can see we’ve got all the history going back to see how we were looking at previous points in the year.

We’ve come down here, we can see we’re still in progress. Workflow is being taken care of by Anaplan. We can simply submit when we’re ready. At this point, we’ve got a view of our opportunities of our salespeople in the Northeast. If we focus on Ron, for example, down here, we’ve got some summary-level information around how Ron’s doing. We’ve got some adjustments going through there, and we can see that detail being mapped out on the lower portion of the screen against the individual account. So, for example, this account, for this product, on a contract term of three years, we put an adjustment in there, overriding what’s come out of Salesforce.

We’ve got Salesforce close showing this date here, but for the purposes of the forecast, we’re going to make an adjustment to that closed date. In addition, we look at the next lock down. We can see here, we’re adjusting the forecast from a commit to upside. Overall, that gives us a revised forecast of commit, upside, and total, which we can then submit up to the next level to our AVP for review.

At the next level up, in summary, we’ve looked at three areas that Anaplan can help in the sales performance management process within the organisation. Firstly, sales planning, helping organisations focus resources in the right way and in the right places. Secondly, incentives and rewards, using the levers to drive the behaviour that matches the market strategy that the company wants. Lastly, sales forecasting, helping to predict better and more consistently, and also react quickly and effectively to changes that are happening in the marketplace. [Music]