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.

1. We operate remotely using GoToMeeting.com. Once introductions are over, Simon (an on-boarder app coach) passed presenter status to the trial company – enabling us to view the trialist’s screen.
2. It takes a minute to log into Anaplan and salesforce – we review the salesforce data structures and custom fields.
3. The trial company exchanges salesforce security credentials with Anaplan (these are simple to get) and then runs the Anaplan Import using the salesforce API.
4. For a larger implementation with 8,000 live opportunities it took less than 20 seconds to transfer all the data. Some custom fields took a few minutes to understand.
5. The trial company completes a couple of set-up mappings eg (reps > org structure), (sales stages > pipeline, forecast). Extra data like sales plans and rep admin details are entered later.
6. The shortest set-up time from start to finish was < 10 minutes; the longest about 22 minutes. Every week thereafter its two clicks and RUN.
7. And then the fun starts. Over the next 20 – 40 minutes Simon guided the trialist through the app, with her data being used as the reference point. In the first week we focused on general themes, rep performance against quota, capacity plans, personalization etc.
8. The second week provides the data to compare ‘what’s changed’ since the previous week. the Compare function – its unique and revealing.

One point has became quite clear – it’s much faster using one of our app coaches to onboard than DIY. Saves at least 60 minutes of fluffing around.