Unknown Speaker 0:00:09.2:

Today I'm joined by Ciena, with Scott Soukup from Ciena, a long-time Anaplan customer, with Jo Youn, also from Ciena, and Nadia Dessouki from Relanto. That was the implementation part, and we're going to talk about what happened at Ciena, how they've used Anaplan, where they began their journey, where they are now, and what some of their future plans are. Typically we like to hold questions to the end, to the last ten minutes. I don't find that to be very valuable, because we have lots of people out here who have questions about Anaplan. They're either working with Anaplan today and they'd love to have access to these professionals, which I'm excited to have, and also people who are thinking about Anaplan and they really want the raw answers, just tell me like it is, because that's what we want to do. With that, let me start with introductions, so Scott, if you wouldn't mind.

 

Scott Soukup 0:01:04.1:

Sure, thanks. I'm Scott Soukup, I'm at Ciena, I've been there for 25 years. I've done multiple jobs, from quality engineering when we used to actually manufacture our equipment. I've done IT for 12 years, where I did data warehousing, integrations, BI, saw a lot of implementations while I was there. Then for the past seven years - I think I've been seven years, it's hard to keep track of all the years where I've been, but I work in the finance space and I'm currently the Anaplan platform owner. The COE reports into me, model builders, as well as the admin side of the house, as well as I also have a small data team. I also have another assurance role, which is we keep track of price books and discount approvals, so forming that architect and that assurance role within Ciena.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:01:57.3:

Jo.

 

Jo Youn 0:01:58.4:

I'm Jo Youn, senior manager for global sales compensation at Ciena. I've been with Ciena for about two years now. Previous to Ciena my experience has been in sales compensation, sales support, sales strategy, and sales analytics. At Ciena right now with sales compensation, I do also manage sales planning quota and territories.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:02:23.0:

Nadia.

 

Nadia Dessouki 0:02:23.8:

Hello everyone, my name is Nadia Dessouki, I'm the chief sales officer with Relanto. Relanto, we're a very proud Anaplan partner, but we're an AI centric, advisory led consulting firm based on the West Coast, so very excited to be here today. Unfortunately my partner in crime, Prakash Hariharan, could not be here. He's our chief planning officer, and he comes with a deep Anaplan background. He used to work at Anaplan, he worked for one of the first enterprises that implemented Anaplan, so he's got a very unique lens from customer to partner and with the platform company.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:02:55.6:

Yes, it's unfortunate Prakash couldn't make it, but I will say he was probably the chief architect, if not the chief architect one of the chief architects, of the sales performance management practice at Anaplan. He helped develop all of our models, the ones that helped us get into incentive compensation management, territory and quota, everything that we do there. Prakash left a few years ago to work with Relanto, and we're delighted that he's still part of our ecosystem and he's advising companies like Ciena. Scott, maybe we could dive a little bit into Ciena, what you guys do, and I'm going to ask you some deeper questions about it.

 

Scott Soukup 0:03:29.1:

Sure. Let me ask you a question. How many people have heard of Ciena? A few, okay. How many people, I've seen people use their cell phones today, I know Anaplan is a cloud platform. I'm sure most of us go home and we stream some sort of content. Well, Ciena is a company that builds the networking equipment, fiber optic based, that moves all those bits of data and voice from one place to another place. We do that across the world. We do submarine deployments in the oceans around Africa, around the APAC region too, but we are the number one company that does that within North America, top two in Europe, and very significant role in Asia too. Basically, we enable all the data flowing that happens across this world and across the globe, so that's what we do, and it's all fiber optic based. Even if you haven't heard about us, we're part of everything you do.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:04:30.5:

You're the company that everyone uses every day and knows nothing about.

 

Scott Soukup 0:04:33.7:

Exactly.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:04:35.4:

I know you just had a tremendous Q1, right?

 

Scott Soukup 0:04:38.3:

Yes. I guess they're now equating us with some AI, because I hear AI is becoming a thing. It's moving towards the front of the datacenter, and then once it starts moving out of the datacenters, it's going to come across our networks. Yes, we're starting to be an AI player.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:04:53.2:

You mentioned that the Anaplan practice inside of Ciena reports into you, and you used the word 'center of excellence'. I know that there's lots of people out here who are responsible for leading centers of excellence, trying to get them off the ground, or thinking about it. Can you just tell us about what a COE looks like for you and how you've structured it?

 

Scott Soukup 0:05:12.6:

That's a good question. We've grown a bit. We've always had a lot of also outside-in advice on how we should do this, but generally speaking, our COE today I would say has pretty much three pillars. We have a model building team. We have a really good solution architect that handles all the enterprise, so right now we're building out connected planning. He's working with Prakash and others, but he's building that whole architecture, how we're going to connect everything. Much like you heard that Anaplan is doing with their apps, we're doing in a bespoke way. He has five model builders that report into him, and we focus our model builders on certain areas of models. We have someone who's really focused on the revenue assurance models, we have model builders focused on the cost center expense workforce planning model, and then we have some folks that float around some of the different bespoke models we have.

 

Scott Soukup 0:06:12.5:

Really we have that model builder community, and then we have someone who's also a former model builder who does more of the admin workforce. He tries to make sure we have segregation of duties and we're doing the right thing from an audit perspective and a compliance perspective, and then again we have the data. Everyone you heard today, everyone's talking about data. We do have a lot of governance around data. We have people, we have a small team that is trying to make sure the data coming in can be trusted, or at least can be understood, and then also how we get the data out is making sure that that data is published and curated properly.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:06:47.7:

Are there COE leaders out in the audience today, anybody leading a COE, responsible for it? Yes, so the question I get from lots of our customers is, is it better to have somebody who is a model builder and teach them the business, or is it better to have someone who knows the business and teach them model building? I know it's not as simple as that, but what's your philosophy on that, Scott?

 

Scott Soukup 0:07:08.8:

That was not planned. Yes, we've struggled with this a little bit. What we find is that at least in our business, the business experts, they're trying to grow their career, they're trying to be better at the business they do. Trying to have someone who understands the world of financial planning analysis, someone understands the role of the sales compensation, those people are not eager to take a sidestep into Anaplan model building. What we have found is that what we're trying to do is always get someone who understands. We bring people that are fairly young, in fact our model building team is fairly young, and so we're trying to get them to understand the business more, by working more closely with the business partners, like Jo. In other words, it would be important to me if we have a model builder who has enough time to spend with Jo and her team and what they're trying to do, and then figure it out, and we use the term artisan within the company. We want someone who is really technically savvy, at least solution architect certified people who could probably become master Anaplanners, and then really we want them to spend time learning how the business works so that they can then figure out how to deploy the technology to fit the business. It's more the technical, learn the business.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:08:29.9:

I know one of the reasons why you brought Relanto in was just because of the relationship you guys had with Prakash, and he's been there and he's done that before. I always say to an Anaplan customer, the worst thing that can happen to you, if you have a partner that comes in and tells you and builds what you want instead of what you need, because they should come in with some perspective on the thousands of implementations that they've done in other places. I think that's been some of the value for Relanto. Nadia, what do you think?

 

Nadia Dessouki 0:08:55.1:

Absolutely, I think one of the values that we have is we've done this at so many different areas in the enterprise, and we've seen so many different challenges. Our goal is to really advise our customers throughout this process and help a lot with the user acceptance, and actually the functionality of the tool from a user experience standpoint. Our goal is to make sure that it's not just designed well, but the people are actually using it the way that it's intended to be used, and I think that was something that we tried to bring into the Ciena conversation.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:09:27.0:

I think just in sales and revenue operations, when I talk to people and I say I've been around long enough to make every mistake you could possibly make, I know which ones to avoid, and I'm not saying that our partners make mistakes, but they certainly have a lot of experience and they can bring that to the table, and that's very beneficial. Scott, can you just tell us about the journey that you've been on with Anaplan?

 

Scott Soukup 0:09:45.5:

Yes, I think as you'll see here we've been propagating, I guess now the term is bespoke models. We started with three, which was our workforce planning, cost center expense, and then our revenue assurance.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:09:58.3:

So you started in finance.

 

Scott Soukup 0:09:59.1:

Started finance, yes. Well, actually started HR. HR was our first model that delivered and stabilized, and then as you see here with the different colors, we're sort of hitting different business units. We moved from two business units up to five business units, and now we're moving into over this year or next year covering seven different business units. It's been about really trying to find adjacencies, trying to find willing partners to travel with us from wherever. If you've done an Anaplan, you know the change management is a very hard thing to overcome. You have to work a lot with the different users. We have users who, I've been doing this for 25 years and one of my favorite stories is I did a supply and demand sort of an application almost 25 years ago. It got people able to see, where you couldn't see all the parts you had to manage, you could only see one part of the time in their application, and so I built something cell based with a SQL server back end.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:11:13.5:

In a spreadsheet, you could actually filter all that. You could actually see what you need to go action, and my first experience with change management was I went up there, met with the users, and someone had printed out all the spreadsheets and was going through them, because they didn't know how to use Excel. The same thing happens with Anaplan, where you have people who are into an Excel world or are used to doing things on their own, they are the process. What we try to do is we try to find the people who are willing to step in, and then we can deploy something that's tangential to where we built.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:11:49.1:

I love that, they are the process.

 

Scott Soukup 0:11:51.3:

They are the process.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:11:52.0:

Some describe it that way, because a lot of times if we're talking to somebody that's a revenue operations leader and we ask them how they plan, they just say, 'We just do.' In their muscle memory, they've never really documented it before, and for them, when we start to talk to them, especially about our applications, we say, look, we're not saying it's a prescribed way of doing it, but we certainly have some best practices that we bring to the table. They find that almost every company is following many of the same steps that they all follow, but they've just never documented or put it together in some sort of a prescribed way. I think the value of that is that you don't have to rebuild the process and the infrastructure at the beginning of every single year. It's something that outlasts the architects and it just keeps going.

 

Scott Soukup 0:12:34.5:

Oh, yes.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:12:35.8:

When you're thinking about the roadmap for Anaplan at Ciena, how do you do it? Do people submit formal requests? Do they tell you what they need? Do you evaluate it? I talk about AWS a lot because they have what they call a federated model, where they've got people centralized that are responsible for building models that get propagated throughout the company, but then they also allow some freedom down in the field for people to build models themselves. It's sort of a risk that way, but they like the flexibility, so what's your philosophy?

 

Scott Soukup 0:13:07.4:

Well, I think the first thing we do is we try to, with the exception of, like - so the HR, the workforce planning was critical. The headcount is a large part of our expenses, so you had to build that to get into expense planning. Otherwise, we try to stay within the FP&A user community. Our manager, who is the head of planning, spends a lot of time with the executive. She knows where the company is going, she knows where the pain points are, so a lot of times it's her setting that direction. This is where we need Anaplan to go, and then we take that, I take it and we figure, how do we go get that?

 

Unknown Speaker 0:13:47.6:

We've been on this Anaplan discipline conversation, COE. Does anyone have any questions about COE? Any things that you'd like to ask directly to Scott on how he manages anything. You can just raise your hand, if anyone has questions. Okay, here we go. Steven.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:14:07.1:

I'm always interested about how you work with business leaders to educate what is [?possible 0:14:16.5]. People often don't know what technology can actually deliver, so how does that work?

 

Scott Soukup 0:14:24.7:

I'll start and let you finish this one, okay? She works really close with parts of the business. I think really, a lot of the business leaders, they get a lot of the art of the possible from different companies, different people come in. Even within Ciena, IT may want to say, hey, we can do this with AI, we can do this with BI, so there's always the art of possible there. I think it really has to come down to understanding what's going to add some value, what's going to make their lives easier. What is it they don't have to do anymore? I think sometimes it's the customers who have the loudest opinions about things actually are the ones who give the strongest signal on what you have to do. It's really listening, a lot of listening. It's also a lot of placing some bets. I don't know that we are going to be successful until we're successful, so it's more of an art than a science, I would say. That's the answer you wanted, but it's…

 

Unknown Speaker 0:15:32.6:

Did you have a formal process by which [unclear words 0:15:34.7] meetings with the business leaders at regular intervals?

 

Scott Soukup 0:15:39.7:

Not so much, no. Ciena is not that formal internally on stuff like that.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:15:43.7:

Do the business unit owners ever come to you and say, 'I heard how you helped Jo,' which we'll talk about in a second, 'You think you could help me with Anaplan?'

 

Scott Soukup 0:15:54.3:

Yes, so definitely favorable opinion travels. Not quite as fast as is ill-favorable opinion, but it does travel. That does help too, yes. Good point.

 

Nadia Dessouki 0:16:09.4:

One of the things just to quickly note on that question from a Relanto standpoint, we really try to involve the business in our rapid prototyping, and what we find is that really helps with the adoption to see and continuously see the value in the platform, if they're constantly involved while we're playing around and prototyping.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:16:29.5:

I hear a lot of our customers talk about the time to value for standing up an Anaplan model, where they go to the COE on Monday with a problem, then they have a model that's been built by Wednesday, and then they're off and running on Thursday and they're like, oh, that was fast. We've been working on this problem for years, and we've just been suffering through it. Had I known, I would have talked to you guys a long time ago. I think that's one of the trademarks of a great COE, is to be able to do that. Jo, let's talk about how Scott helped you and just about the background of the organization, what you're really responsible for. Let's do a little bit of a deep dive and give us an idea of some of the scope, where you started, where you went, and where you are now.

 

Jo Youn 0:17:12.1:

Absolutely, so as Scott mentioned, we had our initial Anaplan models sitting in FP&A. Ciena is a unique case because sales comp actually sits under the FP&A organization. In my previous experience, I'm used to it sitting under sales or sales operations, sometimes HR, so this was my first realm from a finance perspective. There's a little bit of a balancing act, for sure, because we report to a VP of finance who is very finance brained, and then my stakeholders are of course the sales teams, the sales managers and the leaders who are not so finance brained, and so it was a really unique journey, I will say. We brought on the Anaplan sales planning model I think three years ago, and that was before I joined. In the three years I think a lot of the teams grew, so our sales operations from the regions, they grew. The requirements really shifted, so last year we came to a turning point where it was very much a make it or break it situation with Anaplan directly.

 

Jo Youn 0:18:22.8:

We had a postmortem following our last year's planning cycle, and it was essentially mob mentality, to put it nicely, where everyone, all the sales operations leaders, even the direct sales, they came to us and they essentially said, 'We don't want to work with Anaplan. We've been seeing delays, it's not giving us what we want. We can't plan with this,' and so we came out of that session really spinning our wheels and trying to understand what we need to provide to our customers, which is sales. That's really where the Relanto partnership came in, and it was a true partnership in that sense. We had all this feedback and all these enhancements that came from the postmortem, and we essentially said, how do we go about implementing everything and turning it around in several months? When Relanto came in, and I will say full credit to our internal Anaplanners, they're so talented. When Prakash came in with his team, he assessed our model and he said, 'Listen, the back end data, the model is built really well. It's just the user interface and the user experience that you're going to need to improve, and that's what's going to shift the mentality of your customer group.'

 

Jo Youn 0:19:49.5:

The focus is really on that, really transforming how they interact with the model, what they input, how they make adjustments, and how they essentially plan and map their territories and their quotas. This year in the past few months, we accomplished something really great where we have our full sales population in the model now. This was a big ideal state that we wanted to get to, and we have our partners team, we have our channels teams, we have our overlays, and all the structures of the different sales teams are also incorporated into our model. Our process is a bit extensive, where the planning process starts with budget and then it goes down all the way to the individual contributor seller. We also have an audit and validation phase of this process, and the reporting and the validation rules were also fully implemented into the model, and it allowed everyone to stay in the model, remain there. That was a big challenge as well. They had to go outside of the model to do some analysis, get some insights, but it really shifted things around with this partnership and just the evolution.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:21:15.1:

So this was the field sales organization and sales operations coming back to you saying, 'We've had a terrible experience.'

 

Jo Youn 0:21:20.9:

Exactly.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:21:21.7:

It sounds to me like they did what salespeople do: they started to negotiate with an opening offer of, 'Let's tear it out,' and then you negotiated back and said, 'Well, let's improve the user experience.'

 

Jo Youn 0:21:32.5:

Exactly.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:21:33.7:

In the old model, what were some of the things, were they missing - how long was it taking you to get your compensation plans out, your territories and quotas? How accurate were they? Was that an issue?

 

Jo Youn 0:21:44.3:

Yes, absolutely. I think really the biggest challenge was delay in time and lags from the model, just of how the user interface was interacting with the end users, and so we gained a lot of time. It took months for us to get our quotas out, and we have annual quotas. We have a pretty decent size population of sellers, and it's multi-channel. It's very unique cases, very nuanced, and so being able to get that efficiency, that productivity. I would say also a big win is just the synergy with the other FP&A models. Being able to pull in data, so we were asked to put in historicals for customers, three to five years of historicals. Employee performance, what their attainments were, as well as Salesforce opportunity pipelines. All that data that was coming from different models or different systems was able to also be integrated to deliver greater insights as well.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:22:48.9:

There's a really good piece of research I read recently from Sales Benchmark Index. I don't know if you know these guys, but they literally collect sales benchmarks from thousands of companies, and they've kept it for I think going on 15 years. They looked at companies that achieve what they call a fast start, which means that their sellers leave their sales kick-off with their territories, their quotas, compensation plans in hand, versus those that do not. Those that do not, it's often two or three months into the quarter, maybe even six months into the fiscal year, where they're still trying to bring their sellers on board. Those companies that achieve a fast start on average grow at 18 per cent year over year. Those that do not are three per cent. Only 27 per cent of the companies start with a fast start, and maybe like five per cent of them fail to achieve that fast start after they go, but the ones that don't almost never recover. Really the compelling case for improved sales planning is you're going to lose a quarter if you don't do it, and if it happened to you last year, it's going to happen to you again next year, and it's just a repetitive cycle. It sounds to me like you guys had made some headway in the past, but there was improvement to be made, and you brought in Relanto. There was a lot that was right, but your customers just weren't seeing that. For compensation, are you responsible for designing the compensation plans?

 

Jo Youn 0:24:11.9:

Yes, I would say. Ciena is also kind of unique in this scenario. We technically have one comp plan, but we try to merge all the structures of our different sales teams into this one comp plan. That actually added to the challenge of, how do we plan and distribute quotas appropriately for these different teams? Our customers go from Verizon all the way to Amazon, Google, and it's just a different business structure and business model that we have to adapt to from a sales team perspective. Yes, definitely in the overall design, in the overall process. My role is kind of unique because I'm product owner, but I'm also process owner.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:24:59.8:

You ensure people get paid every month.

 

Jo Youn 0:25:01.1:

Exactly.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:25:02.3:

Sometimes you see a bifurcation between the comp owner, the person that's responsible for the calculation, and sales operations, thus territory and quota. It sounds to me like you have a role that bridges these two universes.

 

Jo Youn 0:25:17.6:

Exactly.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:25:18.7:

Really because the compensation person is the one that gets blamed for all the inefficiencies in the upstream process. You could have the most well-designed compensation plan, but if you can't get the territories and quotas in the hands of the reps and sell them to them, then it becomes an issue, so you are involved in the upstream as well as territory.

 

Jo Youn 0:25:34.8:

Yes, I get the good, the bad, the ugly all coming at me, for sure. I think my role is more facilitating, so sales operations, along with of course the sales managers and the leaders, they are responsible for actual quotas, but me in my role as the intermediary, I am responsible for allowing or facilitating that process to go into a system or a model, as we did.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:26:05.7:

For 850 sellers, before you went and did the redesign with Scott and with Nadia, you said that it took you a while to get the compensation plans out, and territories and quotas. After you did everything, was there a difference in the way that the organization performed?

 

Jo Youn 0:26:21.8:

Definitely. I think, as I mentioned, the synergies between the models. We actually had one global sales ops leader come back after the cycle was finished and he said, 'I didn't know Anaplan could do these things, have these functionalities, and I'm so glad that we were able to stay in this app, in this tool, to do all of our audit and our validation.' Just as an example, our Europe and Middle East/Africa region, it's about 150 sellers. That full validation of whether quotas are distributed properly, territories and accounts are mapped and assigned accordingly, that entire exercise maybe took four days, versus the previous year I think it took three weeks. Having that reporting and delivering the insights just in real time was a huge time saver.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:27:15.7:

Was there a difference in the accuracy? How much rework did you have to do in the past versus now?

 

Jo Youn 0:27:20.4:

Absolutely, yes. Huge, drastic reduction.

 

Scott Soukup 0:27:25.8:

Yes, so in other words, in the app now they're able to do something and see the impact. It's right there immediate.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:27:35.7:

Having been in sales and revenue operations, I've found a lot of times the people above you, maybe even the CRO, they just want their compensation plans and territories and quotas out on time. They don't necessarily care about the pain that the operations team goes through, and it's hard to make them care about that. They start to care if they've missed the quarter because of these types of things, and it's our responsibility to explain how we can fix these. My experience has been when you start to go through a planning cycle, some of the first questions are, where's the information I need? How do I get it? How do I keep it updated? How do I share it? How do I get it back? How do I disseminate it to the organizations that need to be a part of it after the fact? When you build this living platform that's in place, what you did, Scott, what's the difference now in the way that it's done versus how you did it even before you had Anaplan?

 

Scott Soukup 0:28:29.0:

We have this one pretty diagram. It shows 2019 with our business architecture with applications we have, like Oracle is doing its thing, Salesforce is doing its thing, we have Workday in there, and then the whole planning platform is just a bunch of Excel spreadsheets and people emailing back and forth. Some very well-engineered processes and macros and all that stuff, it's just amazing. You could almost launch a rocket system with Excel, but what we have now is that, and you've kind of seen it on this morning's keynote. We really now have this, Anaplan for us is kind of, we have a planning platform now. It has some other apps as well, but Anaplan is the core there. Anaplan is the one that brings it all together. Anaplan also led the build out of our Snowflake data warehouse, because we were going to overrun the ability of the Oracle data warehouse we had, so the IT team support would build up - it was driving a lot of this connectedness, and having it there. We now have really a planning platform, and the number of spreadsheets, we're using spreadsheets differently now.

 

Scott Soukup 0:29:49.1:

Spreadsheets used to be the source of truth, and you could have multiple sources of the same truth on different people's desktops. Now you have people using Excel more for in-process analysis, quick bespoke type, oh, I need to understand what's going on here. Again we've got rid of a lot of the spreadsheets that were essentially the sources of truth for forecast. All that is in Anaplan now, everything from on the OpEx side to the revenue side. We have a P&L built out, so everything is well connected, and we're also too, more importantly, learning. A couple years ago, we would not have thought how important sales comp planning was to the ecosystem. Now we start building this in a certain way, now you understand, well, we now understand how it's connected from getting information, but we also see how it can be connected for providing information. There are concepts of also like, what are the edge models? Things that are kind of the dead end models, that has gone away now, where everything is its own center of its own universe in the way it's all connected, which has been a really interesting learning for us over the past.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:30:58.0:

Once you launch territories, quotas, compensation plans, the day after, something changes inside of the business. Somebody resigns, you hire somebody else; how are you managing that?

 

Jo Youn 0:31:08.2:

All our HR data is integrated into the Anaplan model for planning, and so this is updated, refreshed on a regular basis. We can see when there are terminations, we can see when there are transfers from roles to roles or regions to regions, and then our sales operations leaders, of course they adapt, they create new quotas. We're going to expand a little bit more on that, but the data is all integrated.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:31:38.8:

In operations, they often say one of the hardest things to count is people, because it's such a moving target all the time, and roster management is one of the greatest frustrations for the organization. You're doing all that with Anaplan, so the operations people know when somebody joined the company that they need a quota. Are you tracking the changes in the quota between the individuals? Are you reassigning it from person to person?

 

Jo Youn 0:32:02.2:

Yes, so that's in our next phase of enhancements, I would say, to have versioning where a person could potentially have two roles. They switch into roles and you could see what their first role quota is and territory is, and then their second role. Right now it's more of an override that we're doing, but that is something that we're looking into building.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:32:24.3:

Yes, it's when you've got all these quotas that are sitting out there in the field, occasionally things can happen where a quota is not covered, or somebody parks it in a vacant territory, which means that somebody else's quota is under allocated, which means you're drawing bigger checks off the company checkbook to pay people for commissions and things like that. It gets really expensive, so I think one of the mistakes I've seen companies make is they invest a lot in the upfront territory and quota process, but they don't think about post-implementation and how they're going to manage those moves, adds and changes after, because those add up. I think if I had any advice for anybody that's going through this now, think about that day two and how you're going to manage that. Relanto, tell me about your engagement here, how you guys got involved and how you've helped other companies.

 

Nadia Dessouki 0:33:09.4:

Well actually, we met at Anaplan Connect New York last year.

 

Scott Soukup 0:33:13.4:

Yes, last year. It's our anniversary.

 

Nadia Dessouki 0:33:17.3:

I think at the time Scott met with Prakash and you guys had a discussion. We were first brought in for just some initial work, but I think we were able to quickly align. We created such a great partnership, and I think Prakash adds so much thought leadership into Anaplan in particular, to help again with a lot of those challenges that I think Ciena was facing from the business confidence being low in the platform. That was a big focus area for us, but we met here last year.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:33:47.8:

Did you have to talk him off the ledge like, hey, let's make this thing work, or…?

 

Nadia Dessouki 0:33:51.5:

Yes, I think for us that's our, you know…

 

Scott Soukup 0:33:53.8:

I think one of the things too is we sought out Prakash for a reason. One is because one of the things we've learned is we're in an interesting industry. We're in telecom equipment. We manufacture, but we're not in manufacturing, right? What we build and what we deliver is all project based, so 60 per cent of the business is new networks being created. For example, you know all the AI stuff going on, so these big cloud providers are now trying to build out more datacenters. Anaplan is trying to build more datacenters. These projects, their networks are not just cut and paste. They're like widgets we're shipping out. We have to build into their design. One of the things is like, when you're looking at how do we plan for the business, how do we actually do the planning, the revenue planning, the forecasting, it's helpful for us to get - and that's why we went to Prakash. We know that he had experience in our industry, he understood our industry. He understood what a salesperson in Ciena does, because he understood what a salesperson in another company did. That experience I think was really useful to us.

 

Scott Soukup 0:35:06.8:

A combination of the industry experience, and it was also too we needed someone, again, with young model builders, they think they can solve world hunger. They learn the tool, they know the Planual, they do it very well, but it's really about we need someone more seasoned, more time in the industry, seen trends play out over time. Over 25 years you see the same things come full circle sometimes, but I think it was really important because we also wanted not someone to actually do the work, but someone to have the hand on the shoulder. We wanted our model builders to fail, and then you have someone like Prakash and his team to sit there and say, okay, this is what you could have done. Have you thought about this? That was very important to us because when you have a model or an application like we had, it failed in the way it failed because it was built for a different audience, different user community, different requirements. It's a big blow to the person who built that model, but that was one of the things too, is that we also understood we need this growth opportunity within our team. That's why we reached out to someone with that experience, who actually came in and with the velvet glove, mold and shape and turn a very good solution architect into someone who could really listen to the business and can learn through this experience. That's why we went for…

 

Unknown Speaker 0:36:36.2:

Well, in telco, revenue recognition is complicated because companies have massive projects that go on forever, and it's king. You're always looking to accelerate revenue. Are your salespeople compensated for bookings, revenue, margin, all of it?

 

Scott Soukup 0:36:50.4:

All of it.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:36:51.7:

So they really care about project management, don't they, and ensuring that projects get completed and you get the revenue recognition, so they can get paid.

 

Jo Youn 0:36:58.5:

For sure.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:36:59.0:

Are you using Anaplan for any of that backlog management and tracking of what's in the pipe and what's due?

 

Scott Soukup 0:37:04.9:

Oh, yes. Our main revenue assurance model, I think 80 per cent, 85 - IT did a study on this - 85 per cent of all the business application data comes into this one model, and then we apply thousands and thousands of rules based on customer contracts, and they're all different. We basically replicate our revenue recognition engine in Anaplan. You give us a PO, you give us an opportunity, we can tell you exactly how that revenue is going to profile, when it's going to trigger, based on all this other information. What was it, again, this is a stat I've used before. To do that without Anaplan in the early days, it was 30,000 clicks or interactions with spreadsheets and other tools. Now a new PO comes in, it's right there, no clicks. It's profiled out, and then the FP&A person can actually look at it and say, does that make sense? There's something else I know about this. I put some human intelligence on top of this, so that's what that revenue assurance model is doing every day.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:38:13.8:

Do the reps ever get to look at that revenue recognition piece of it?

 

Jo Youn 0:38:18.9:

No.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:38:20.4:

Because that's how they get paid. I came from 15 years in telco, so I have a lot of trauma.

 

Jo Youn 0:38:26.6:

Yes, and I'd love to add to the partnership piece as well. It really was, like I mentioned, a collaboration where Prakash and his team came together with our team, our Anaplanners, model builders, but also he was directly there with the end users, from end to end. Him and his team at Relanto, they wanted to understand directly what they were looking for, what the feedback was, what they needed, essentially, and turned that into something. I say sales comp planning for Ciena, it was kind of a guinea pig in terms of this partnership with Ciena and Relanto. That's where we found the real success, that collaboration and that cooperation between teams.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:39:17.5

I'm sure there's someone in the audience who's about to embark on the journey you just went through. What piece of advice do you have for somebody that's just where you were a year ago?

 

Jo Youn 0:39:26.0:

Patience, I would say, but also I think for me personally, it was really valuable to be familiar with the model even on the technical side, just to understand. This is what Prakash is really great at as well, is teaching and also mentoring. Even though I'm not a developer by any means, being able to understand the data that's coming in, how things are built out into the model, how it's going to come out as an output to the end users, was extremely valuable. I would say just try to absorb learnings, and the cross-functional communication and dialog has to be constant. I was with the sales operations leaders, the sales teams, almost on a daily basis. They were in their testing, they were doing their references. Every day was very much, is this what you're looking for? What can we do? How do we improve it? Tell me exactly what you need.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:40:29.8:

You really immersed yourself in the implementation, so they could learn what they were doing as they were going through.

 

Jo Youn 0:40:34.2:

Exactly, and then it's vice versa as well. If an Anaplanner or model developer came in and they said, 'It's not going to work this way, but we want to try a different angle,' bringing that back to the end users, it's just that closed loop of feedback all around.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:40:53.7:

Scott, how about you? What's your advice?

 

Scott Soukup 0:40:58.2:

The more you hear Jo tell the story, of course I lived it, but just to hear you tell it right now, I think what's really important is that it's important to - it takes sort of a community to do this stuff, right? There's a lot of companies out there doing things, there's a lot of partners out there doing things, and I think it's a little cheesy here, but coming to events like this where you can meet people, hear the stories and hear what people are doing, is important. I think again, this is where if I were not doing this for the past couple years, I would not have been able to provide Jo the resource that we needed, and Anaplan Seattle would have been totally different right now.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:41:44.8:

Nadia, there are people out there in the audience contemplating jumping in the Anaplan water, and they're on the fence. It's complicated, it can be expensive, we're not sure what we're getting ourselves into. What would you tell them? What's the value that you've seen a lot of your clients get? What makes it worth it?

 

Nadia Dessouki 0:42:02.3:

I think it's being able to derive the actionable insights. I think when the platform is used to help drive the decision excellence is so much value, but also the connected planning aspect. I think that's something that we focus on in Relanto. It's not just let's say from a sales perspective, but it's also we understand from finance, supply chain, and really to connect those insights together is where we see so much value for our customers. With Ciena I think that was our ultimate goal. How can we have that be our North Star to start chipping away at that ultimate goal?

 

Unknown Speaker 0:42:35.8:

Yes, and Scott, one last question. You mentioned, and I love this, the people are the process. What happens to those people when Anaplan becomes the process? Personally, do they feel threatened by it, or are they afraid of being replaced?

 

Scott Soukup 0:42:51.3:

I think we've been doing this long enough people are not afraid of that. We have some good stories of people who are celebrating the fact that they're not having to manage so many spreadsheets right now. They're able to go and spend more time learning their space, so if you're an FP&A person for supply chain, you get to learn more about what supply chain is doing, those trends. It's all about freeing up those experts who got into finance for a certain reason. It wasn't to do spreadsheets, but to actually become finance people.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:43:19.4:

Well, I know just in the operations and finance functions, you end up spending a lot of time in administrative work, and that's not really where you want to be. That should be automated, especially now AI is coming on. That's going to take responsibility for that. You don't go away, it means you get to focus on the opportunities.

 

Scott Soukup 0:43:33.6:

Exactly.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:43:35.0:

Growing the business and maintaining that.