Sales

As we reach the last few weeks of the calendar year, many sales organizations put their blinders on and focus exclusively on closing business in a busy shopping season. But it is never too early to start thinking about what comes next from a sales planning perspective. How will you measure and motivate your sales force in the next year? What changes, if any, do you need to make? Anaplan experts have created a series of solution guides to help you get started. For this post, we aim to help users get the most out of our Quota Planning Solution Guide. For more general background information on the solution guides, check out our discussion with Anaplan’s own @PamWalker.   Using sales quota planning to maximize team performance A sales quota is a time-bound milestone used to measure performance and motivate sellers. When designed well, quotas can be a powerful way to keep sellers performing at their maximum potential. Yet quota planning is not a one-size-fits-all process; every organization will have a unique approach based on its product mix, market dynamics, and go-to-market strategy. Quota planning in Anaplan provides users and model builders a lot of flexibility so they can create and optimize their sales quotas during annual planning — and throughout the year. In general, quotas should strike a balance between being aspirational and motivating for sellers, while still meeting revenue objectives. When quotas are too high, they are demotivating and frustrating. When they’re too low, you may exceed your compensation budget with high payouts. It varies by industry, but best-in-class organizations aim for 60-70% of sellers achieving quota.   Leveraging best practice steps for quota planning  Best practice approaches to planning and managing quotas include the following steps: Model market condition scenarios. View total market revenue “what-if” scenario results using calculated relative account value and adjustment options. Top-down target setting. “Total Target” is distributed proportionally top-down through the sales hierarchy. The proportion differs based on the allocation method. For example, an even allocation method takes the organization’s revenue goal and divides this equally across all territories.  Additionally, targets are often over-allocated down the hierarchy by sales leaders to create a buffer.  Bottom-up target setting. Calculate and associate potential revenue amount to customers and prospects to determine territory potential and sales capacity. Aggregate potential revenue up the territory hierarchy. A mixture of top-down and Bottom-up target setting. Process where top-down and bottom-up territory planning are combined, which allows input from executives and sales and results in more realistic targets. Sales coverage planning. Ratio of account assignments where salespeople can make their quota while effectively providing the optimal service to accounts and prospects. Sales analysis. Measure your sales progress throughout the year. Analysis allows you and your sales team to identify weaknesses in your sales strategy and make changes so that you can improve the results over the next period. Be sure to check out the Quota Planning Solution Guide for common challenges, details on using Predictive Insights in Anaplan to augment your planning process, a full dashboard and demo flow, and more.           ... View more

Greetings! Thank you for joining us for Anaplan Live! This is an open-ended discussion for anybody navigating here from the S ales & Revenue Leaders breakout room. Feel free to respond to this message with any questions or comments for Anaplan or the sales model builder community. Also, if you haven't already, be sure to join the Sales Group so you can stay on top of future events and discussions. From the group home page, just click the "Join Group" button to join.  ... View more

Did you see the announcement on our Community blog? Anaplan has achieved a Sales Performance Management (SPM) Customers' Choice recognition on Gartner Peer Insights, a peer review platform hosted by Gartner.   This is the second year in a row that Anaplan has been named a Customers' Choice vendor in the SPM category. And it is all thanks to you —  our customers, partners and model builders. You play an incredibly important role at Anaplan, both by being engaged users of the platform and by sharing your thoughts and feedback.   So thank you, and congratulations!   ... View more

Calling all Anaplan enthusiasts in sales, sales operations, revenue operations, or sales finance:   Anaplan Live! is coming soon. This is a great opportunity to hear from practice leaders and customers on their Anaplan journeys. Anaplan Live! is a free virtual event series designed t o help you and your business go further, faster with Anaplan . Don’t miss it!   On November 9, hear from Anaplan leaders and featured customer speakers from ServiceNow, Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, and more, along with on-demand sessions tailored for your industry.   On November 10, take a deep dive into the aspects of model building that pertain most to you, with experiences specifically for Aspiring Solution Architects, UX Designers, and Developers. Interact directly with customer and partner experts as well as your peers. Plus, learn about the latest features from our Product team in a special fireside chat.   Register here to join us! ... View more

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