[NOTES] Chris Weiss on Anaplan Community

I thought I'd type up and share more of my notes. Please feel free to add anything I might've missed or correct anything that I may have miswritten! 🙂

- We look at the Anaplan ecosystem as ONE workforce

- The community joins everyone together to bring connected planning to life an then help businesses achieve breakthrough business performance

- Community: What are my peers (Anaplan partners & customers) working on?

- We host Anaplan Live events (the last one was in June)

- We also sometimes have Anaplan: Spotlight events

- The community also offers continuing education and supports enablement opportunities

- It can be beneficial to ask yourself, what do executives want to hear when you present to them?

- Remember that any expertise you have outside of Anaplan is going to have value in the community.

- There needs to be strong data leading to business decisions for what we do. 

- What are the next logical steps to bringing in the broader world of business solutions?

- Anaplan is on a path to become a billion dollar business

- Any new community member can plug themselves in and learn Anaplan from others.

- Most customers only use Anaplan for 1-2 business use cases. We need to make customers as successful as possible as fast as we can so they can expand their Anaplan use.

- The community is a vehicle to accelerate customer adoption of the platform and features, "Why should we use X? How do we get started?"

- In theory, while it might take customers 12-18 months to find new features normally, with the community, that drops to 9 months for community members.

- We want people to be excited about the Anaplan system

-- Question: What happens if someone adds misinformation to the Anaplan Community Space?

--- Answer: 

-- Used to have more moderators at the start

-- Operations Excellence Group (OEG) were moderators at first but as we've grown the community, the community has started to self-moderate.

-- From a competitive 

-- From a competitive stand-point, 85% of the community is completely public - and we see this as a good thing.

-- All our competitors are about 5 years behind us, so we don't worry about them catching up because we stay ahead

-- We do catch spam and remove it. 

- Our goal is for community members to become lifelong Anaplan members

- We look at the attrition rates of all Anaplan users in the community.

- We want our external ecosystem to define what we're providing - that way, everything we do is customer first.

- Mentions a Deloitte Book about Connected Planning

- We're still in the first 3% of Anaplan's total lifetime.

- We want to give people opportunities to build their personal brand and skills and share that with the community.

- We aim to create a super exciting and engaging space. 

- You can get more support through the community

- Anaplan currently has a 118 retention rate: This is made up of new customers and customers who've bought Anaplan, continuing to use it or expand within 12 months of original purchase.

- (Gross retention rate - Did they keep the thing they bought? -- This is capped at 100%)

--Question: Maintaining engagement?

-- Answer:

-- People need to see themselves to keep engaged and they need to see others like themselves.

-- Requires a LOT of content, so there's always something new

-- We encourage people to interact in different ways: i.e. forums, comments, events, Zoom chats, user group meetups, etc.

-- Celebrating community members & highlighting people's wins & successes. (i.e. This is what "great looks like" or "this is what a good Anaplanner is")

- How to use Community?
- Enable yourself.

- Find opportunities to learn everything you can

- Ask questions

- Read the Wiki

- Ask, how are people using the platform?

- All of the people on the Anaplan community are your peers/coworkers

- "Blue toaster of death"

- Build a network on community

- Build your brand publicly [let Chris or his team know if you want to write an article].