Molly Ball 0:00:08.6:

Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to track two. I know we're after snack time, so I hope you're all feeling very invigorated. I'm Molly. I'm a regional vice president here at Anaplan. I manage our telco, media and tech accounts throughout the region of varying different sizes, lots of our strategic accounts, and have been working with Ben here at Arrow for the last couple of years both in my role as an individual contributor and then now in this role as RVP. The session today, I believe has two names, but we'll go with the one I like better, 'Evolving Your Go-To-Market Strategy by Connecting Financial and Sales Planning.' So we're going to dive into this topic around the value of making decisions in an organization where you're really thinking about not only your go-to-market strategy but the financial implications of that. We're going to share a real-world success story with Arrow here. So Ben from Arrow, thank you for joining us.  

 

Ben Klay 0:01:09.7:

Of course.  

 

Molly Ball 0:01:11.4:

Ben is the president of ECS business unit within Arrow for North America, so why don't you give us a little background on your role and your tenure, and all that? 

 

Ben Klay 0:01:24.8:

I have been with the company across 25 years this year. Pretty traditional path, started as smiling and dialing. Had an opportunity to oversee some of our Asia-Pacific operations at some point, and I stepped into the president role 14 months ago, I think. It's been a good run.  

 

Molly Ball 0:01:49.4:

We're glad for you stepping into that role. It's been a good thing for us. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about Arrow and the business of Arrow? Products that you distribute, all that.  

 

Ben Klay 0:01:58.4:

Sure. Interestingly enough, Arrow is celebrating our 90th birthday this year. Thank you. You don't get to be 90 without making good decisions. We were founded on Cortlandt Street, was our initial location, which is just not far from here. Arrow at its core is a technology distributor. We have two distinct businesses that we take to market. We have a components business which, yes, big warehouses and lots of things that we ship around the world, but that business at its core is a design services business, so anything that plugs into the wall or connects into the internet our goal is to design from the board up. Then the other part of the business for us is enterprise computing solutions, which is where I sit, and that is all things onprem, hybrid, cloud, and I guess I'll say automation in terms of our platform and what we offer. Customerwise, if you think about our components, they're anyone that's, again, designing something or plugging into the wall. It's not generally for consumer, although we do have some consumer clients. It's mostly B2B. We hope that the world loves them and buys lots of them. A little bit of manufacturing on that side, but that's not a core competency.  

 

Ben Klay 0:03:20.2:

Then for us we sell through a system of VARs or resellers, system integrators, but also service providers, CSP, MSP, MSSP. So that's what we do.  

 

Molly Ball 0:03:34.8:

Yes, thank you. Super-simple, it sounds like. [Laughter] So what was the driving force to start using Anaplan in the initial use cases? 

 

Ben Klay 0:03:48.0:

Automation, transparency, accuracy, creativity, and I guess scale, I would say, is what we were after. We grew up in a business… Again, the business is obviously very old. We ran off spreadsheets. Raise your hand if you want to go back to spreadsheets. No. There's a few people actually raised their hands. [Laughter] We don't want to go back to spreadsheets. When we started with Anaplan, the driving force in addition to the hopes, wishes and desires of the words I just shared, we were actually pursuing two very large pieces of business - I mean very, very large - and we went through all of the financial engineering on a spreadsheet, and once we completed that exercise for both we actually were awarded the business in one case and not in the other. What we came to realize is the amount of man-hours that was involved in pursuing that business, 50 per cent successful and winning, was just not sustainable. There was just no way that we could deliver on our goals with the sort of roadblock and congestion that was involved with that process.  

 

Ben Klay 0:05:14.7:

The other piece… I think you asked me about use cases to start. I hope you did. We had a commercial business and a public-sector business. Obviously, we had an ERP system or IT stack for both, for obvious reasons. We really struggled to get a consolidated view of any performance in any sort of timely fashion. You'd get a commercial spreadsheet, a public-sector spreadsheet, then we'd pay people a lot of money to smash them together and say, 'Well, here's how we've performed on a consolidated basis.' That was a real challenge for us, given the pace that both businesses were growing. That's really what caused us to look at Anaplan. The first use case was this customer contract process that we needed to modernize.  

 

Molly Ball 0:06:01.3:

Yes, trying to remove any profit leakage in that deal structure, but also the risk associated with not knowing if what you were presenting was what had been approved internally, and you're on the 80th iteration of the deal.  

 

Ben Klay 0:06:14.2:

Yes. I'll just expand on that. All the businesses are complex. We have lots of customers. So do all of you. AS a distributor, though, it's my job to represent hundreds and hundreds of different OEMs, ISPs, infrastructure providers, hyperscalers, and all the things that go into an IT solution. They all represent a different way for us to make money. So yes, there's a transactional margin when you book a deal, but then with each of the vendors there's a different sort of calculation that you do for your profitability. You might do business with one customer who's buying 50 or 60 or 70 things from you ten times a day. Doing a financial model to be able to secure that business becomes pretty complex based on all the different profit scenarios. That was another one of the drivers.  

 

Molly Ball 0:07:01.0:

Thanks. So then if we talk about the evolution of Arrow's journey with Anaplan, that's where you started is this deal modelling. Where has the platform taken you from there? 

 

Ben Klay 0:07:12.0:

360 sales planning and core finance. I had dinner with [unclear words 0:07:17.6] last night, and all of the elements of our finance function are in Anaplan now. So forecasting, quota setting, budgeting, just financial planning for the upcoming year, fiscal period, all that's done in Anaplan today. There is a single pocket case at the moment, which is a brand-new business that we just stood up, that will enter Anaplan in the second quarter with help from my friend Tristan over there from Anavate, but largely everything else is in Anaplan for us. The sales realm, world, we have so many wins with the transparency and the ability for our sellers to be more effective, and I'll read my notes because there's quite a few. I can now change the metrics on how I pay my people. I could never do that before, so if you think about transactional margin, some sort of additional profit opportunity for us as a distributor, less whatever I invest in this partner, that's the calculation that you would go through to land at your true profitability in any relationship, any time period, any deal. I couldn't do that before except for on a very large spreadsheet.  

 

Ben Klay 0:08:33.6:

Our planning cycle for sales reduced 90 days, right out of the gate. So we spent three months, so basically the last month of Q3, the first two months of Q4, and then we kind of ignored it while we finished the year, and then you move in to finish in January. With Anaplan we've kicked that down to just a coupleofweek process. It's absolutely phenomenal in terms of time saving and accuracy. If I want to reswizzle a territory, reassign some sort of supplier relationship, that took weeks before. It literally takes minutes. You log into Anaplan, you make your choices, and you click the button and you're done. It's fantastic. Real-time measurement of sales performance. I can look whenever I want. The guys at Anavate made Ben's dashboard just for me, so I can look at any customer and supplier combination whenever I want and see our true profitability for any time period or for any specific deal. That also extends to my sellers and my sales leadership, so they now can make better business decisions in real time whereas before it was a request of finance and a process that they had to go through. If it was large enough it had to come across my desk. All of that stuff is automated now, so it's been pretty spectacular.  

 

Ben Klay 0:09:53.4:

Then the fiscal planning piece, if I just add to that, if there's sales leaders in the room, the quota process previously took six weeks, probably. It's now done in a week, and if you're an effective sales leader and you're astute with Anaplan you can do it much faster than that, but even for a newbie with Anaplan in our organization, they spend a week to go through and set their targets for their teams and their territories, all the things that go into that. They do that in a week, and it's a very, very large… As a distributor, we're in a volume game, so you could imagine the scale of the [unclear word 0:10:32.5] is pretty substantial. That's been a huge win for us as well. We integrate with Salesforce if you're a Salesforce user. I'm sure most of you are. Integrates with our ERP, integrates with our HR systems, so it's been pretty darn good. 

 

Molly Ball 0:10:51.4:

Yes, good. I love to hear it. It's been fun. You started talking a little bit about the impact to the sellers and the value of a more motivated seller. What kind of impact on productivity and seller behavior can you see in your organization? 

 

Ben Klay 0:11:10.4:

We had last year, for '24, and there's some folks from Anaplan and some folks from Anavate that I have to thank, but we really put them up against a hard deadline to deliver our quotas by a specific day, the first week of January, and previously we were unable to do that. We were able to execute on that, and the idea behind it was, the faster you get a seller their quota the more selling days that they'll have in the year. That was a shock to the sellers that had been in our organization for a long time. They'd just sort of accepted that you were going to get six weeks into the year before you get your quota, in a bad year maybe a little bit longer. So we used to sort of set the tone for the year of, 'Here's your quota, get going,' and they were accurate. There weren't a ton of changes that you had to make for customer and vendor and vertical, and all the things that go into quota setting. The team was just floored. So the expectation was that productivity would improve, and it did.  

 

Ben Klay 0:12:05.7:

Sellers can go in and see any given time, 'My quota's a dollar. How close am I to a dollar?' It's one day in arrears, so if they look on Tuesday they'll see Monday's results. They can look at a deal and see if they want to escalate that to their sales leader. If there's some sort of concessions they want to make, they can look at it and see how it impacts them financially. Even our sales leaders. Historically, giving a light P&L, if you will, to someone running a region so that they wouldn't have to come and ask mom and dad for, 'I want to hire some people,' or 'I want to invest in this, that and the other thing for my territory to grow.' There was a whole process for that in the past. Now, with the visibility that they have in Anaplan, the requests that have come forward have come down about 75 per cent because they can see, and they have this visibility and transparency, the effects that decision might make, good or bad, on the businesses that they oversee, whether individual contributor or front-line sales manager, even a director or a VP. So that's been fantastic.  

 

Molly Ball 0:13:11.2:

Yes, great. That is fantastic. All right, so now it's time for your Guy Stanley finance hat to come on. There's lots of people here that come from a finance background. We're talking a lot about the connection of sales and finance. Do you want to talk a little bit about that overlap? 

 

Ben Klay 0:13:27.9:

I do, and I will. Molly has the inside scoop at Arrow. So I am not a financial genius, so I'm the perfect leader to have a CFO handy. What I would say is, Anaplan has modernized our finance function, so in previous years I shared all the timelines and things that we went through to get to a plan, or to close a fiscal period as an example. Guy wasn't able to be here. We've just finished our first quarter, so we're just closing that out. That was a seven-day process previously, and he'll be done with that by Wednesday of this week. So in previous quarters he would start… So we finished on a Saturday. He would have started Sunday, and gone all the way through to Sunday, and then the following Monday he would have posted the result for our geography to corporate. Now he's able to do that in just three days. That to us is fabulous. If you think about closing a year… So that's a quarter. A year, much more goes into the reporting, the detail. That was a couple-of-week process. He's able to do that in half the time now.  

 

Ben Klay 0:14:38.5:

When we submitted our financial justification for the purchase of Anaplan, it actually achieved all the financial metrics in about nine months against a year time horizon. So we were able to deliver on the savings and the benefits much faster. The flexibility that we have makes my peers jealous at times. Within Arrow there's ECS and components, but then there's sister companies under each of the divisions. I'm sure you're familiar with that. We have the ability to answer a question for a global CFO for a business or ENC-level CFO in real time. So the call might come about performance in a market, or a specific category or specific vendor, whatever it might be. You just give them the answer. Before, they would call and ask, expecting to wait three, four, five days for the answer because you had to dig into the incredibly large and complex spreadsheet. They're just shocked at the ability to have that information at your fingertips.  

 

Ben Klay 0:15:37.6:

The sales behaviors, so finance and sales aren't always friends, but our ability to align our financial goals with the way that we pay the sellers that I commented on earlier, it's been a huge benefit for our finance organization. I think the biggest one for me is, our finance group can now leverage the work that the rest of the functions do. So by having a single platform that everyone is using, singing from the same sheet of music, sales as an example, all your quotas, all your performance are in one place. Marketing, how we spend those dollars to go out and drive demand. That used to be another very large spreadsheet. That will be, by 6 April, Tristan, right, that will be done and in our Anaplan instance, because the Anavate folks have risen to the task there. It's hard to quantify, but if you're Guy Stanley, who's my CFO, he now can benefit from all of the work of the different functions without having to replicate that, which has been a huge improvement.  

 

Ben Klay 0:16:47.4:

Even intangibles. Our staff meetings are better because the detail is there. Our forecasting that we go through. Everything is in Anaplan. When I sit down to have a forecast delivered by the business, they just open Anaplan. We all log in on Teams around a TV and we literally go through Anaplan. That's how our forecast is done. Previously, spreadsheets, screenshots, put it in a PowerPoint with lots of words and ten different revisions before it to me. It's so simple now. All the data's in one place, and it's up-to-date and it's real time. It's been fantastic , 

 

Molly Ball 0:17:25.9:

Great, thank you. I think this is maybe one or two more questions, and then we can go to some Q&A. What are some of the key performance indicators that you look for, and what are some of the results you've seen? I mean, you've spoken about some of them, like a reduction in planning cycles and higher transparency, but what are some of the other KPIs that you might be looking at? 

 

Ben Klay 0:17:49.7:

Let's see. You'll see the ones I did not hit on here. As a distributor, and I don't know what companies you are with in the audience, but we have a massive amount of marketing dollars that we use to drive the business in terms of demand creation and messaging. Very large company, tremendous amount of dollars. I had no way to measure the effectiveness of it. I didn’t even know at times where it went. So we would finish a quarter, go through a general QBR cadence, and I would ask the question. 'I know how much money we have. I know that we spent most of it.' That's the other part, is it doesn’t even all get spent. 'My question is very simple. What did you spend, and what did it generate?' Two weeks later I was told what we spent it on, so now we're two weeks into the following quarter. The QBR happened the week after we closed the quarter, so we're basically into month two of the following quarter before I can get the answer to a question about the prior quarter. 

 

Ben Klay 0:19:00.0:

I want to know how many leads were generated, what return we got from that, and I want to know quickly. If we need to course-correct or spend in different places, I want to know that. That was all run, again, off a different spreadsheet. We now have the ability to see that, or will on 6 April be able to see every dollar that's coming in, where it's being spent. There's opportunities for us to generate profit off those dollars in certain instances as well. Now we have greater ability to see that in real time, so that in addition to the other areas that I mentioned.  

 

Molly Ball 0:19:32.8:

Yes, that's a good one. That's 6 April, right? 

 

Ben Klay 0:19:35.9:

Day after my birthday. Right, Tristan? 

 

Molly Ball 0:19:41.2:

Okay, so final question here, then. What is next for Arrow and Anaplan, and any advice you might offer to someone starting out this journey? 

 

Ben Klay 0:19:52.3:

I would say perfecting our shiny new toy is what's next for us. Anaplan has opened up our eyes to our ability to move, so we're going to continue to change our business based on market trends and dynamics. Everyone in here will do the same thing, but if we hadn't taken on an Anaplan instance I wouldn't be able to do that. I would be sort of handcuffed by an Excel spreadsheet to be able to move at the pace of business. So the, I guess, lessons learned for me, it's like anything. You hear AI tossed around, and all the buzzwords and technology, but all of those things come back to clean data. We had really good teamwork with our deployment partner, Anavate and Anaplan, but then our functions, in particular with our IT groups, data was pretty solid all the time. Where we needed to course-correct we were able to do that, so I would say clean data is key. The tiger teams you put on the deployments, you need owners by function. For a time even I was an owner. I even got my own page in Anaplan, which is great. It's called Ben's dashboard.  

 

Ben Klay 0:21:08.0:

I would tell you patience. Arrow's a big, complex organization. I'm sure many of yours are as well. I am not patient by any stretch of the imagination, but I learned patience. I also got, in return for patience and collaboration and teamwork, and just agreeing to the milestones and the timelines, I got an excellent product back. I got an excellent output. I've said it a couple of times in here, but a good deployment partner, which I mentioned, and then having an internal owner. It can't be a night job for somebody. Anaplan is incredibly valuable, but you have to learn the tool, and you have to be able to navigate within it and be able to understand the capabilities to get the return you want. That won't surprise anyone. I think early on we thought, 'We have a deployment partner. Great. We have the Anaplan resources. Great. We'll let Bob work on it on the weekends,' and we very quickly realized that you just can't do that. So prioritizing an owner, but then also prioritizing owners by functions, which I mentioned earlier, those would kind of be the lessons learned.  

 

Molly Ball 0:22:15.8:

Yes, I think that sounds great. Thank you.