Unpacking the Sales Solution Guides

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Oftentimes, the most difficult part of any major planning project is simply getting started.

 

What do I need to know to move forward? Where can I turn if I encounter hurdles? What are the conditions that will set me up for success?

 

In the world of sales performance management (SPM), things can quickly go from simple to complex.

 

That’s why Anaplan has prepared a set of detailed technical guides to help you on your journey to SPM greatness. The Sales Solution Guides provide a topical overview, industry best practices, details on workflow and more for Anaplan's sales solutions.

 

This collection of guides is designed to help our customers plan, manage, and execute their entire sales strategy. Each guide represents the culmination of years of industry research and customer experience.

To put a face behind the guides, we would like to introduce Pam Walker-Cleary (@PamWalker), one of Anaplan’s SPM experts.

 

Can you talk through your career background, and what led to your interest in SPM technology?

PW: I sort of fell into SPM after a couple of years in an engineering role long ago. While building out apps for a law firm, I discovered the part of the role I enjoyed the most was meeting with stakeholders, listening to their needs, and designing the apps. The programming part was less appealing. I was hired to implement incentive compensation management (ICM) for a startup after this discovery. I wrote stored procedures to speed up processing and developed a reporting repository to bring all the data together. That soon morphed into customer service and then product management positions. Then web interfaces came along, and finally the cloud. I’ve worked on many iterations of ICM, territory planning, and CRM analytics and managed PM and engineering teams for various companies using different technologies and platforms.

 

When I joined Anaplan, I switched into a partner success manager role, and then joined the Solutions team two years ago. It’s been fun and interesting; I’ve enjoyed working with and meeting people across different teams. SPM is something that never gets boring.

 

What are the Solution Guides, and what makes them unique?

PW: The Sales Solution Guides are a blend of functional industry best practices, dashboard and process interactions, high-level data touch points, and some model building tips and suggestions along with examples. They provide basic functional information and building blocks for implementation. The guides were written with the goal of producing great outcomes for our customers by distilling better understanding of customers pain points and needs and time-tested practices.

 

How would you recommend that model builders and other users approach the Solution Guides?

PW: Each guide provides enough information to help model builders with limited or no domain knowledge to understand what they are building. Functional descriptions, process flowcharts, and screenshots of dashboards and the user interface help to depict what end users need to do to carry out their processes — after all, they say a picture is worth a thousand words.

 

Of course, every implementation is unique and based on each customer’s business, so there are always customizations needed to get things just right.  Successful implementation also requires deep listening skills, good companywide communication, and proficient end user training for complete user adoption.

 

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More information to come, including a more in-depth look at the individual Solution Guides.