Level 3 - Ask the Stakeholders - Establishing Sales Targets
Level 3 - Ask the Stakeholders
Establishing Sales Targets Process Questions
This forum is for asking the stakeholders of the Unicorn Candy Company questions about the Establishing Sales Targets Process. The Anaplan Academy team will be monitoring this forum during US Central standard business hours. Please allow up to 3 business days for a response.
The purpose of this forum is to clarify details regarding the business processes. Questions about model building will be removed from the forum.
Previously asked questions:
Q: Can country sales operation manager also override the sales target for an entire country ? In that scenario, we would assume that the targets would be redistributed just like an override from the regional sales executive. Or is override locked only for regional sales exec?
A: No, Country Sales Operations Managers can not override the sales target, only Regional Sales Execs.
Q: 1. During the Account Review Process Regional Sales Executive wants to review total of initial account sales target by account segment. Where is this parameter of "Account Segment" coming from? Since account segmentation is based on overall potential growth and not the actual sales revenue - this piece needs to be furnished somewhere 2. Are "Sale Seasonality" and "Product Pattern" same in this use case?
3. Targets need to be set annually but may be changed to quarterly in near future - does it mean we have to keep that in mind or we just go ahead with annual approach?
A: 1. Right now, we are using Anaplan to see how our accounts are distributed across the different account segments. We are considering incorporating it more in a further release.
2. When we are talking about "Sale Seasonality" we are referring to the distribution across Quarters. So if my Previous Years sales were Q1 20% Q2 20% Q3 20% Q4 40% for an account, I want them to stay in that pattern. When I am referring to Product Pattern, I want to make sure that is one of Account's Nutzo bar sales makes up 2% of that entire Country's Chocolate sales, that in the next year, it ill still maintain that 2% pattern.
3. Use the Annual Approach.
Q: The basis for next year's projected sales targets is last year (LY) sales.
What do we need to consider about LY sales activities? Do we need to take into account a country or account's last year's growth rate? This would account for partial year sales from a Country or Account that may have been large enough to skew the result. Or, will we take care of that during the override process by the regional sales executives?
A: You need to account for how much of a countries product family sales that an account has previously accounted for. You must also consider the seasonality of it. You do not need to consider their previous year's growth rate.
Q: In the Account review process, "Regional Sales Executives can choose to override an Initial Account Sales Target for one or more of their country's accounts".
"When one or more accounts' Initial Sales Target is overridden, the other accounts within the same country will also have adjusted Initial Account Sales Targets in order to maintain the same total Country Sales Target."
What should happen if all of the accounts are overridden?
A: If should take all of the overridden values.
Q: While I was trying to submit the Target Review UX Prototype I found some misleading info - All this while it was discussed that the target setting will be at Country level and now all of a sudden I see the it will be Country & Product Family level. Even the user story says it should be reflected - Doesn't this mean that it should be flatlined across product families?
A: You will enter it in at the country level and it will be the same for each product family in that country. So if I put 5% increase you'll see that for every product family in that country. Example, if I put a 5% on US, my US - Chocolates will be 105% Us- Sours 105% US-Fudge 105% US- Taffy 105%.
Q: We discussed the Regional Sales Executive role along with its user stories. Unicorn Candy operates currently in 3 regions, America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Will a Regional Sales Executive be responsible for all countries within a region (for example US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil) or countries within a region could be divided between more than one Regional Sales Executive?
A: A Regional Sales Executive be responsible for all countries within their region.
Q: In the wireframe, we created for the Target Review Dashboard, you indicated that you would like to see the following. However, it is my understanding from the user stories and the process review session that the stretch target (Amount Increased) is applied to the FP&A Forecast and not the PY Actuals to arrive at the Initial Country Sales Target.
—-PY Actual Sales Revenue
—-Amount Increased
—-Initial Country Sales Target
Could you please clarify or correct my understanding if wrong?
A: That is correct. The stretch goal is applied to the Baseline Financial Forecast. This is different from the Previous Years Actual.
With the amount increased line item, this is the amount increased from the stretch goal not the amount difference from the last year. So If I put that I want a 5% increase to the Baseline Financial Forecast, I want to be able to see how much that is in dollars. Its just the difference between the Initial Country Sales Target and Baseline Financial Forecast.
Q: For the prototype, can we submit the way it looks in Anaplan like module build or something? Or should it be completely outside Anaplan
A: Submit it how you would do it for a customer. If you like to mock up a UX in Anaplan to show them, by all means do that.
Q: I'm still not clear on how I would relate your accounts to their countries with the information I have so far. I've look in your company's data hub and in what I've built so far and I don't see any information that can link each account to their country. Can you please clarify?
A: Check the Account Systems module.
Q: I am confused about how I relate accounts to a single country in SYS11: for example candyate, when there are several products that relate to different countries?
A: Use the Accounts location to designate that account to the country.
Q: Since there is only one Final Account Sales Target for each account, I am wondering what is the logic for the formula that take both seasonality and proportionality (py actual sales by product/country py actual sales by product family) into account?
A: There is one Annual Final Sales Target. However, you will need to be given quarterly breakdowns for these. To show how much of each product should be sold each quarter.
Q: How are we managing the account segments as of now?
A: For this release, we are not concerned with anything related to reassigning account segments. In the future, we would like to use Anaplan for account segmentation but it is out of scope for this release.
Q: For the Target Setting user story 1.13 regarding a "reset" ability, I understand you want the ability to adjust (write) your account targets and view (read) other RSE's account targets. If you decide to clear your holds and overrides using the dashboard reset button, do you want to clear all data for all accounts, or just the data for your accounts?
A: We want it to clear for all accounts. Thanks for checking
Q: User story 1: FY20 monthly forecasted revenue by country and product family from the FP&A model to create a Baseline Financial Forecast in the Sales Planning model.
In the FP&A model, we had FY20 forecast figures derived from FY19 Actual data (as past data). I do not recollect that we had actual data for FY20 in FP&A model.
So, would I be using the Forecast of FY20 in FP&A model as Actual for FY20 as baseline while we do sales planning for FY21. That is, the assumption that - the forecast of FY20 derived for FP&A model had in reality also became the actual for FY20.
Is that right (or) am I missing something?
A: In our scenario (the Level 3 Model Building Course) , the current period is January 2020. This means our previous year with actuals will be FY19 data, that we will bring in as our baseline forecast for our current year, 2020. When you get into the build section, you will see that we provide a file for the 2020 ( mainly because we didn't want inconsistency).
Q: Who is managing what account belongs to which segment?
A: Country Sales Operations Managers can dispute their assigned targets, but these discussions happen outside the platform. There is no need to build in any functionality around this.
Q: Does the team want functionality to be able to assign Accounts to Segments in Anaplan?
— Can the country sales operations manager dispute their assigned targets?
— What I mean is if a country sales operations manager doesn't agree and has a reason for it, does he have the ability to raise that to Regional Sales Executive?
— Does the team edit the targets for future quarters based on actuals for the current quarter?
A: There is no editing of the targets at the quarterly level but if I am understanding your question, you are asking how are the quarterly targets calculated. Previous years actuals are used to define the initial account sales target quarterly distribution. However, after the Account Review, when going from our Initial Account Sales Targets to our Final Account Sales Target, we want to use the quarterly distribution of the Initial Account Sales Target.
Q: Does the data coming from FPnA go through any initial data sanity or we can use that directly as Baseline Financial Forecast? The same question for POS revenue data - directly use source data or process and use?
A: The Baseline Financial Forecast and POS Revenue data do not need to be further processed before they can be used.
Q: Regarding the Account Review process, what is the relationship between Accounts, Segments and Country?
A: Each Account is assigned to a territory. Each country has multiple territories. When it comes to the segments, each account is given a segment S/M/L.
Q: I need some clarification regarding the Sprint 1 instructions. In User Story 1.2 section 3.3 "Check Your Build", we're asked to compare our model (downloaded from the training) to the image in the training. But the dimensionality in the model we downloaded isn't even close to the image in the training. The model download for the TAR01 Detailed Sales Targets module is Time (Quarters) and A2 Account>Product#, but in the training screenshot the dimensionality is Time (Quarters), P1 Product Family, and G2 Country.
At any point in this Level 3 training are we expected to completely reconfigure the module dimensionality that was given to us when we downloaded the model, or is this an error in the training that needs to be fixed? The line items are also inconsistent in both cases of the TAR01 module.
A: Those are for two different User Stories. When I built out the beginner model, I was struggling with how do I name them. The TAR01 in the starter model, is actually the 3rd Target setting module that I built out. I did not want to name it TAR03 in the starter model because I though that would have lead to confusions as to where TAR01 and TAR02 are.
The module in the training screen shot is for setting your Initial Country Sales Target. The TAR01 Details Sales Target is for establishing your Initial Account Sales Target.
Q: This is a question to user story 1.4 (sprint 1, point 5.2, TAR01 Detailed Sales Target module). In the training it shows an example with accounts by country. Where is this information coming from? As I understand it, country will be a property of account but uptill this part of training there was no information about the country-account relation (maybe I missed it?). I do not see it in the data hub (nor level 3 sales planning model) list/system modules or in the files provided so far. Could you hint where this information can be found or how to obtain it if possible?
A: Yes you are right. It is just for explanation purpose as in how should the calculations be made within the system and how should it look like at country level.
Q: I know there have been a few questions around this, but can you please clarify what the process is for this allocation? It seems that Candy Unicorn Company's process is to determine an allocation for 1) product family by country, and 2) product family by account - and then how do you utilize this to establishing the Initial Account Sales Target?
A: You want to multiply that by your Initial Country Sales Target to get your Account Sales Targets.
Account A's previous year nutzo bar sales took up 2% of all of the Chocolate family sales for their country. I want to make sure that when I am setting next years target, I adjust it so that Account A's nutzo bar sales take up 2% of all of the chocolate family sales for their country. So once you establish the allocation, multiply that to the initial county sales.
Q: I require some clarify on the requirements for the Target Review.
The process discussions and user stories (1.1 & 1.2) refer to setting stretch targets against the Baseline Financial Forecast from FP&A, and showing related differences.
The related UX prototype request appears however to want to see differences to the 2019 actual sales revenue.
Does the user require a UX which shows target comparisons to basline forecase, 2019 actuals, or both?
A: In your calculation module you need to show the difference in absolute values when the user inputs the Stretch goal in Percentages. This is for current year only. The stretch goal percentage and baseline are used to establish the initial country target.
Q: The data of baseline financial forecast by country and product family and the data of historic revenue by product from 2019 actual sales is inconsistent. The sum of product revenues by product family and country using the later file does not equal to the number provided by the former file. As a result, I am wondering if we could only use the by product data to calculate the detailed sales target?
A: These are 2 different sets of data and are not supposed to be equal. One is the actual sales data for the FY19 and the other is a forecast for FY20.
Answers
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I have been using the new UX in my Anaplan work to date so I am not that familiar with the Assign action but looking at the documentation it seems to simply place a list item under a particular parent in a parent list. If that is the case, and a list item can only ever have one parent, I cannot see how the situation can arise where an Account is allocated to two or more Territories as is contemplated in User Story 2.2.
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I can see that the initial sales target is intended to potentially be overriden at the Annual / account level (user stories 1.7-1.10) and then this final sales target is to be redistributed on a quarterly basis (user story 1.11) however it would seem to be also be required to be allocated monthly given the final output needs to be monthly (Sales Rep Comission Forecast - User Story 3.3) and I would imagine also by Product given the initial sales target was previously allocated by product (user stories 1.4/1.5). It would seem strange to allocate the initial sales target by Product but not the final one. Can you please confirm the requirement here?
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Hi @MattMurphy,
For your first question, please reference the microlessons associated with user story 2.5.
For your second question, quarterly data has to be transformed into a monthly value. The requirement is explained in detail in user story 3.3.0 -
Is there any deference between seasonality of
sales and Actual sales ratio?
also review the total of
Regional sales executive also reviews initial account sales targets by account
segment. So he review for all country or particular his country only?0 -
There weren't explicit instructions to do so, but are we supposed to be creating the dashboards for these processes, or just the back-end build?
If so, how would we go about ensuring certain users can only view/edit their specific countries when we don't have an employee or user list for the model?
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I believe we are only supposed to create the prototypes. I simply did mine in excel and then copied it into powerpoint. This was essentially the same process that I went through with Anaplan consultants for my companies implementation when setting up user stories.
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Hi @MatthewS,
Assuming you are at the end of the Process Flow & UX Design section, you need only to create prototypes of the user experience at this stage, not live dashboards/UX pages.
As you progress through the course, you will design and build a model that will provide the data and interactions needed to support the user experience.0 -
@connections puzzle I have used the new UX at work but it seems to have many unresolved problems.
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@BeckyO Not sure if this question goes here or where I should post it. I am in Sprint 1 of Level 3- Section 5.2. The Model I downloaded had G4T Territory>Account# list empty. Without relationship between Account to Country there does not seem to be any way of aggregating sales data dimensioned by Product Family and Account to the Country level. Am I missing a data file to import? I did not come across it so far.
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Hi @sparker, Level 3 does not come with step-by-step instructions, the learners are to use user stories and model building specifications and what other resource available to work through what parts of the model are missing and have to be built out in order to get to their model to reflect the same as the Check Your Build activity of each lesson.
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I have drawn up some process flows for the three overarching initiatives of; can I have somone review them and see if I missed any steps? Thanks!
https://lucid.app/lucidchart/1b902b3b-ae13-4249-89a1-e5d5091c87a8/edit?invitationId=inv_3e940764-2d7c-46ec-8182-99770b9becd60 -
Hi.
During the Sales Target Review. Should we consider that Overrides are becoming Hold?
If not does this mean that Overriden values not marked as Hold should be adjusted when others overrides happen?0 -
I want to complete Anaplan level 3 for that i require Anaplan workspace access so i want to Connect with model builders for opportunities for model builder junior roles. Please help me.
Rohan
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@Flame - Unfortunately, our Talent Builder Program, which provides workspace access for independent learners, only covers Level 1 and Level 2 Model Building courses.
Learners are expected to have real-world experience before proceeding to the Level 3 Model Building Course, so we do not provide workspace access for Level 3.
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