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1989
Ah the good old eighties. Yuppies, the FiloFax and it's when Harry met Sally. Oh, and people were using spreadsheets to run their businesses. Very progressive.
Understanding Forecasting
This post was inspired by a tweet I received after posting a recent Anaplan article last week, (SFDC vs Anaplan) outlining the differences between how Anaplan and salesforce.com perform sales forecasting. I'd like to genuinely thank that consultant, (who shall remain nameless), for inspiring me to outline how mis-understood forecasting sales and financial information is, especially in the CRM community and around how people think salesforce.com does it.
The Big Restructuring
I am starting to notice a pattern here. As we talk to the ever-growing group of salesforce.com users, I am often asked what kind of "reports and dashboards" can you produce? Perhaps they ask for these static views of their data because that is what they are used to. Or maybe they are hoping to take the data deluge and turn it into something that is manageable. Regardless, what they get carries inherent latency and may well be out of synch with the current situation.
Wanted: Pure Talent to be trained in Customer Facing Roles
In 20 years I've seen the good and the bad. The BAD include:
On-boarding salesforce.com customers into Anaplan takes 10 - 22 minutes.
In one very busy 8 hour period last week we on-boarded several trial companies with 10 to 100’s of sales reps each. I observed them all and here’s how we did it.
Enable the debate
“All of us are smarter than any of us.” -- Dr. Douglas Merrill, former CIO, Google
How Anaplan became so fast and flexible - thank you Steve Jobs
Since our launch a few days ago I've been flooded with questions as to how we got to be so fast and flexible. Our primary goal building Anaplan was to be the fastest and easiest to use multi-dimensional modeling platform by Orders of Magnitude from existing 'old-world' solutions.
R.I.P. Budgeting
I recently found an article that talks about budgeting. I could not resist commenting as I think this has gone the way of the Dodo. Here's the original article from Fred Wilson, a VC in NYC who we follow. He writes great articles and blog posts and is well worth reading.
Change is the hardest thing
During the last several years I have worn many hats, from investment partner to COO, a Board member and advisor and, of late, start up exec. From these vantage points, I note a recurring theme: bad habits die hard. There is an entrenched fabric to most organizations that supports unquestioned assumptions and the reversion to: "this is how we do things". I recently read an interview in the MIT Sloan Review with Tom Malone, he of organizational effectiveness and design fame.
One Slice or Two?
It's a cheesy title, (excuse the pun) I know, but it got you to read this far.
