Unknown Speaker 0:00:11.2: 

Hi, everybody. Welcome. Our next session is closing the loop between sales coverage and hiring plans, and I'm really excited to introduce the team who is giving this presentation, Kevin Markl, Annika McGraw. Did I get it right? Annika McGraw and Thibaud Raucoules. Thank you. 

Thibaud Raucoules 0:00:32.6: 

Are you doing the slide? 

Annika McGraw 0:00:33.3: 

I can do the slides. I'm glad you just introduced us because Thibaud and I have been practicing how he can say my last name in a heavy French accent all afternoon. 

Thibaud Raucoules 0:00:44.5: 

Annika McGraw. 

Annika McGraw 0:00:46.6: 

Yes, that was great. I needed him to try it. 

Thibaud Raucoules 0:00:49.1: 

Thank you. All right, so thank you all for coming. So we are here today to talk about a problem which is very common and somewhat overlooked, which is the disconnect between revenue planning and workforce execution. That's a problem we see a lot across a lot of industries, and that's a very core problem because, for a lot of industries, revenue does not scale with software or infrastructure, only scale with people. So whether you are in insurance, in business services, you can be insurance agent, relationship manager, account executive, all these roles are becoming harder to recruit, slower to onboard and more competitive to retain. So when revenue falls short, a lot of organizations think that they have a hiring problem when in fact they have a planning problem because their only plan is built on a capacity that does not yet exist. So, every year, with your organization that say, 'We need 50 more people to hit our numbers,' but that plan is typically based on 3 assumptions. That the right talent are available, that hiring will be fast, and that productivity will happen quickly. In reality, you have time to hire, time to get someone in the seat, and [unclear word 0:02:09.6] of productivity. So there really is a structural disconnect between go-to-market planning and go-to-market strategy and workforce execution. 

Thibaud Raucoules 0:02:20.3: 

You have two teams working on one outcome, but processes happening sequentially and in silo, which brings us back to the core problem. When your revenue falls short, it's not necessarily a hiring problem. It is a planning alignment problem. So how do you fix a planning alignment problem? By connecting planning processes. So that's what we've done by connecting go-to-market capacity planning to Operational Workforce Planning as an integrated business planning application on the Anaplan platform. So your go-to-market capacity planning application will provide you with the demand signal and Operational Workforce Planning translates that demand into a workforce plan, to application with best practices out of the box and fully configurable to your organization. So instead of working in isolation, you can work pace and send plan and assumption. So that we know we say the two demands. Let's dive into the revenue side of the equation. So our go-to-market capacity planning application covers the end-to-end capacity planning process. It enables leaders to build their resource allocation plan to meet their targets. The application will provide out-of-the-box recommendation and automation on what is the best time to hire, what is realistic run scale, and what is an expected productivity, and what is the ratio of my entire go-to-market organization? 

Thibaud Raucoules 0:04:01.7: 

So as I mentioned, building our Anaplan will only solve one part of the problem, but I also need to understand, are the right talent available? How much time does it actually take to get someone in seats, those might turn out the acquisition team as a capacity to hire, and what is the impact of attrition on my plan? So that's what Operational Workforce Planning does, and Annika is going to cover what is in the application and how it is connected to go-to-market capacity. 

Annika McGraw 0:04:31.8: 

Yes, and I work on our workforce applications team and in the team that has gone together to come up with a solution. We see our customers struggling when it seems like the recruitment plans can't keep up with our hiring plans, or the business leaders are finding out about late hires way too late, to the point that it's already impacted revenue expectations. We see that becoming a problem, and that's why we've developed this solution that again brings that go-to-market capacity planning application and our Operational Workforce Planning application together. You're going to see some of both applications in today's demo, but again we just want to highlight you're just getting a taste today. There's a lot that is covered in both of these apps, and we see some examples here for Operational Workforce Planning. It's everything from top-down workforce budgets set by finance, skills-based planning, position management, planning for different scenarios, whether it might be a reduction in force or a hiring freeze, or even accelerated business growth. The big point here is I like to focus more on understanding the primary user groups that the Operational Workforce Planning, or OWP app supports because it's very central to anything that happens in the business. So when a business leader says, 'Hey, I've got to grow my team by 20 per cent,' HRBPs have to figure out the who, the what, the when, the where. 

Annika McGraw 0:06:21.6: 

Finance has to understand, what does that mean in terms of the financial impact, how does that impact our budgets, am I going to approve this, and tell an acquisition that needs to go start building networks, getting that recruiting process, getting a candidate pool ready to go. All of these things need to work together. These groups need to be aligned to really adapt to any sort of business change, but we see that's very much a struggle in a lot of organizations. So that's what OWP aims to achieve and bring that solution to our customers out of the box, and in this example, the business leader are those go-to-market leaders planning out their seller capacity. Something that's so important because it has a direct impact on revenue. So let's take a look at what this solution actually looks like. We're going to get into a demo. So throughout this demo, we're going to go between the OWP Operational Workforce Planning app and the go-to-market capacity application. We're going to integrate data back and forth. We are going to play different roles, like go-to-market leadership, human resources and talent, starting from the beginning of the year where we build out sales capacity plans, we embed better insights and assumptions from our HR teams into those capacity plans. We'll talk about that in a moment. We build the plan, then we're going to take that plan and operationalize it, actually turn it into an actionable workforce plan. Where am I going to hire the seller? What is their compensation package going to be? 

Annika McGraw 0:08:15.6: 

Then we figure out, how do we execute on that? So this is where we bring in talent acquisition to say, 'Hey, we've got to hire all of these positions; do you have enough recruiters to support that, to actually make it happen when we're reliant on it to happen?' Then, finally here, getting all these stakeholders in one connected planning solution. It's not just about the small example you're going to see today related to annual planning. It's about continuous revisions, continuous alignment, continuous collaboration throughout the year as any sort of business process changes. Okay, so we're going to start off as a go-to-market leader and we're going to jump right into the go-to-market capacity planning application. Here, we're looking at total revenue and I'm going to rely on Thibaud a little bit to play our go-to-market leader. So, Thibaud, when you get your revenue targets here, where are you at in the capacity planning process? 

Thibaud Raucoules 0:09:28.9: 

Thank you. So, as Annika said, the applications are really rich. So we're really focusing on the process and we are there, there is way more in the application. At this point in the process, I'm a sales leader, I have a lot of headcount and budgets, approve my finance. I have validated my assumption with my operation team on time to ramp, base time to hire and expected productivity per role. So here, I'm going through the application, and I will provide my hiring plan in order to reach my targets. 

Annika McGraw 0:10:01.8: 

Yes, so again, revenue targets, and now we need to figure out do we have the people to support it. So that means understanding, building up plans, so it's Anaplan building up many different scenarios, and doing that sort of what-if scenario analysis, but what we're really doing here, as Thibaud said, is understanding the hiring plan. So, what are the different headcounts in and outs? How many people are rehiring? But to really understand that, we need to know what is our expectation of leavers. Do we expect there to be a lot of attrition, because then we need to hire more? We need to accurately understand this, because it directly impacts our ability to hit the revenue numbers. So, we're going to start by building out an attrition plan, and here, Thibaud, I'm going to pick on you again. As a go-to-market planner, how do you, typically, come up with your attrition plans for the year? 

Thibaud Raucoules 0:11:09.5: 

So, typically, I will work with my HR business partner, try to identify in my team what are the risks for attrition, but what I really like is more what are the trend hiring and attrition on the markets. 

Annika McGraw 0:11:21.9: 

Yes, so what we've understood by talking to various customers and planners in this space, is there's not very much of a science behind the way that the attrition numbers are coming to be. It might be more a napkin map. So, the first place that we're going to see how our workforce applications and data and plans is integrated, is by pulling that into our attrition planning. So, what you're seeing highlighted on the screen here is an HR attrition forecast, surfaced - from the OWP app - surfaced here on this dashboard, and so this gives an actual benchmark, baseline, or a certain point for your go-to-market leaders to say, 'Hey, from the workforce planners who do this as their job to forecast the attrition, what are they expecting for my org?' and then maybe I have some of my own insights, where I know, hey, our analyst levels, typically, are a little bit more, and layering in that specific knowledge as well. It's not just about surfacing this data from HR and putting it on here as we build out the plans. It's about transparency and how this is data coming to be. Where is it coming from? So, this is the power. As a business unit leader, we can have visibility into those attrition forecasts from HR. So, we're jumping in now to the Operational Workforce Planning application. 

Annika McGraw 0:13:04.4: 

This is where the HR teams, probably a workforce planner, is building out their attrition forecasts over time, and they're looking at broader trends of the organization, things that we don't really have a great understanding of. I'm going to focus on a specific business unit or area of sales for our planning. So, we have visibility. How is HR building up these numbers? They're looking at things like what are trends across region, what are trends across job grades, trends by departments, and then layering on some of their insights as well. Again, the key point here is that, as a sales leader, you referencing this information, we have the traceability, the transparency into how these numbers are coming about. We also, in the OWP application, can have an understanding of, hey, okay, we developed this attrition forecast. What actually happened throughout the year? Was our forecast accurate? What does that mean in terms of the voluntary and involuntary departures that we actually saw? What are the trends? I think, most importantly, it's understanding trends by things like time and position, time since last promotion tenure. Even thinking about layering in things like quota attainment, or incentive comp structure, things like that, so we can start to identify patterns amongst our voluntary attrits, hopefully, driving some better retention going forward. 

Annika McGraw 0:15:00.4: 

So, let's jump back. We talked about attrition, we talked about the headcount outs. Now we can think about, okay, to hit that revenue number, where do we need to hire throughout the year? So, as we add assumptions on building new hires for new sellers into the plan, Thibaud, do you want to share a little bit about how you think about when to hire? 

Thibaud Raucoules 0:15:27.4: 

Sure. So here I'll use Anaplan recommendation. We built a feature in the application that we recommend what is the best time to hire, to hire with your corporate objective, whether it's to optimize margin, or to drive revenue, and so be looking at what's the seasonality, run schedule, do you pay commission upfront to your rep, and the system will tell you what is the best time to hire for the different positions. 

Annika McGraw 0:15:52.2: 

So again, you're seeing a pretty simple example today, but there are a lot more capabilities in terms of getting it very, very prescriptive, until what is the best time to hire for the go-to-market team. However, there's a missing piece. So, here's the missing link that we see happen for a lot of organizations. Let's say we add a couple other hires in January, and if you're paying attention, you'll see that I've got a red alert on my grid there, and a red alert on the hiring plan chart as well. What this is indicating to me is that I have a time to hire alert. I have an unrealistic time to hire expectation. So, I'm going to walk through exactly how this is being calculated. Let's pretend today's date is November 21st, and for this specific role, for this specific seller role. It takes on average 50 days to hire for this role. So. this is an assumption that we're pulling directly, based off historical data, based off assumptions from our talent acquisition team. We're pulling that into the actual process of annual planning itself, so that we're not going forward on completely unrealistic expectations and dependencies of other areas of the business. We're aligning and building our plans with that level of alignment, without having to do the back and forth. So, if this is then shifted to February, that's going to be within a-reasonable-time-to-hire expectations, and we link hands and we align with the rest of the business. 

Annika McGraw 0:17:46.2: 

Moving forward, so, let's say, as a go-to-market leader we build out a bunch of different plans, we have scenario one, two and three, and eventually we're going to figure out, hey, scenario one seems like the plan that we want to move forward with, let's submit that to our leadership for review, but what also happens, then, is that plan is submitted to our HR business partner, submitted to our finance partner, because they're key parts of this process, to actually turn these headcount numbers, a 27 headcount, into a position that has a job title, that has a region, that has a comp plan, etc. Something that could actually be hired for. So that's what we're going to look at now, again, taking those headcount numbers, because they're tied to those revenue targets, and operationalizing the plans in Operational Workforce Planning application. Here, you're getting an insight into HRBP's view, and they're probably working with the business leader and finance partner as well, but they're building out their plans for the year. They get a budget for their cost center. They add some new positions, and they're going to analyze - it's a little small, but we've got a map chart here - they're going to analyze what is the impact of hiring for these new roles in Dallas, or New York City, or Atlanta.  

Annika McGraw 0:19:23.4: 

OWP has rich job frameworks and compensation assumptions, so that we can get very, very specific in understanding what we expect these fully loaded costs to be, especially by differing locations. So. getting to this level of costs, and then sharing that back with the Go-To-Market Capacity Planning app is just going to enrich the planning data, the cost side, the revenue side, that we're working with to make the best decisions for the business. So again, we build out a workforce plan here in OWP. This is an HR leader, or HRBP. What you're not going to see, but what would happen, is this then passes off to a finance person, and they approve the budget, or they send it back, and so on and so forth. The last key part of this process is talent acquisition, and this is key, because it's something that is very often forgotten about. For anyone who read the quote on the slide earlier, only 22 per cent of recruiting executives have visibility into hiring needs for the year. So, of course, this has a direct impact on revenue attainment, but there's a lot of pain felt on the side of our talent acquisition leadership, individuals that I've spoken with, who just have zero clue what's going to happen for the year, and are usually very unprepared to support the hiring needs of the business.  

Annika McGraw 0:21:18.3: 

So here, we're going to pretend we're one of those talent acquisition leaders, and they finally have that visibility that they're always looking for. They understand, hey, how many positions do we need to hire for, they're pulling in data from that attrition forecast we looked at earlier, so how many people do we expect to attrit, because we need to add that to our capacity assumptions too. We might need to backfill for those roles, if their positions are remaining. Then we can compare that with what is our recruiter capacity, and are there any gaps that remain. So having this visibility to this information - here we're looking at the Americas region - that has a pretty significant gap as we get towards the middle and end of the year, and then this is going to be a gap in hiring. These are roles that cannot be supported, and these are roles that the business is reliant on. So, it could be sales roles that are going to impact those revenue targets, it could be other new positions that are tied to the strategic priorities of a company, things that won't be able to be executed on because we do not have the talent that we need for it. So again, this visibility is super-valuable, but we want to actually be able to do something about it. 

Annika McGraw 0:22:48.9: 

So, we've got a little bit of a lead time, we can start thinking about how we can solve for these recruiter capacity gaps, but we're in Anaplan, so we can do some scenario modelling around it as well. So, this is asking things like, 'Hey, how would I impact that gap if I hired a new senior recruiter in January?' and then immediately understanding what is the associated fully loaded costs of that, so what is the budget implication, as well as what is the additional coverage. So how many additional roles do I think I can hire for if I get a new recruiter onboard. Of course, this accounts for things like productivity assumptions, ramping and onboarding. We can also assess things like, hey, we don't need to hire a brand-new recruiter, necessarily. Maybe we just need some more short-term help, so we can think about can we use recruiting vendors to help staff some of these seller positions instead. So here, we're going to model out a couple of different vendors. We've got a temp staffing agency in the first line. We input how many FTE that we're bringing on from this vendor. When are they going to be supporting our company? What are their rates? What are their quotas? Which could differ based off the firm. So, we've got a temp staffing agency that may be a little cheaper, we've got a boutique firm that may be a little more expensive, but the key part is what is the impact onto our costs, yes, but also to our time to hire.  

Annika McGraw 0:24:37.8: 

So, we're going to do a scenario comparison right here. Scenario one, we are adding new external recruiters to our plan. It's going to be more costly. Then, scenario two, we are hiring some new internal recruiters, and it's going to be less costly. Simple enough. The key point here, though, is again looking at the time to hire. Businesses are constantly evolving. You might be in a cost-reduction mode one moment, and then the next month you're in a rapid growth and acceleration mode, and that's where, hey, I don't care about spending extra money to have a boutique firm help us staff up our teams. I need to get everyone onboarded in 39 days or less, but there may be other times where you make the more cost-effective decision. The point is, you can be able to make that decision here. We're going to enrich this sort of decision-making, because it's not just about figuring out the solution to this in a silo, it's bringing in the full picture, because we're connected with the Go-To-Market Planning app.  

Annika McGraw 0:26:01.0: 

So, let's go back now to that scenario planning page in the Go-To-Market Capacity app we were looking at before. Now, we can enrich this data, because, number one, we have more accurate workforce costs. Instead of just a prediction of a high-level headcount, we have positions with comp packages, with locations, all of those assumptions baked in. Then, we also have hiring costs. So, hey, if we hire in this timeframe, that's going to cost us, because we need to go and get a boutique staffing firm to help us get everyone ramped up. So, we're bringing in those more accurate understanding of the workforce costs and what it would take to make this plan actionable upfront during the planning process. Then the most important part is understanding, okay, we have the costs, we're in a Go-To-Market Planning app, let's look at the revenue. So, in this example, we're looking at one where scenario one is a lot more expensive in terms of the workforce costs, the hiring costs, etc., but when we look at the difference in planned bookings, because we're able to get sellers onboarded faster and within an accelerated timeline, those bookings might be nearly double, as we see in this example. So, it's all about making the best decision for the business as a whole, not planning in siloes, and really tracing the impacts from our ability to execute on hiring plans into our ability to execute on our revenue plans as well. 

Annika McGraw 0:28:00.8: 

All right, I've got one more slide to just wrap up what we were looking at with the demo today. Just to reiterate, that alignment, stacking hands on some of these assumptions, as the baseline or the building blocks of our processes, rather than what we see happen in reality, which is no alignment, and then confusion when things do not get achieved, things do not get done, and we hold each other to the wrong sort of expectations. With that, we're going to allow some time for Q&A in just a second, but first, Kevin's going do a quick plug for some of our other apps at our GA today. 

Kevin Markl 0:28:53.2: 

All right, we heard a bit, from EJ this morning, about lots of applications that we've brought to market that we've launched today, including our Sales Forecasting application and revenue orchestration. So if you think of a sales organisation with lots of different revenue models, it could be a consumption model, opportunities where you're thinking about licences, but it could be a service-based model, a project-based model, and you have these service opportunities. Well, how is this tying back into my project resource planning, and how I think about the resource allocation against my strategic priorities against the projects that I need to deliver? We're thinking about how we're closing the loop between these particular applications. So to bring this to light, when we think about different revenue models, we think about an Accenture, a Deloitte. You're getting your accounts at the start of the year. Well, what projects have we executed in the past, historically? What do I have in my pipeline? Is there white space or greenfield opportunities where I can be executing other projects and services? You might be in a SaaS organisation where you're thinking about, yes, I'm selling software, but there's professional services tied to it, so I need to think about my broader pipeline and my deal reviews, and how those two pieces are working together. 

Kevin Markl 0:30:22.6: 

You could be thinking about even in a banking organization, where you're looking at M&A and the bankers that we need to bring in on certain types of deals, where you're thinking about digital transformation, what are the teams we're bringing together. So you have this forecast data, where you know we have these projects coming, but do we have the capacity on the other side to go ahead and deliver it? So forecasting is pulling in those demand signals into the evaluation of, well, do we have the right talent in place right now, whether it's our talent or third-party contractors? Do we have the right skillsets? What is the project availability and the timing of these? Being able to think about how projects might be shifting around. So I think, just like we saw this connection between go-to-market capacity planning and operation workforce planning, there's this connection point between how you're thinking and forecasting your service engagements, and then the delivery of them. So really excited to think about how you're making decisions across your business with all of our applications, and we're excited to talk more about all the applications that we've presented today. So, please, questions for this great team. 

Audience 0:31:38.2: 

I don't have a question, I have a statement, because I think what you said was very clear, and I could really see the impact on the workforce side and the sales side, so very well done.

Annika McGraw 0:31:52.6: 

Well, thank you. Any other statements?  

Thibaud Raucoules 0:31:56.1: 

We didn't pay her. 

Annika McGraw 0:31:57.0: 

Yes, I swear. Question over there. 

Audience 0:32:04.0: 

Hi. I just had a quick question about the out-of-box Operational Workforce Planning model. Our organization is thinking about bringing our current workforce planning model into Polaris. I just wanted to know, are there options for that out-of-box model, or app, to be based on Polaris versus classic? 

Annika McGraw 0:32:29.2: 

There is not an option, because the app is on Polaris. All of our applications use the latest and greatest platform features, so that includes Polaris. That includes ADO, that includes Workflow, and even embedding Anaplan Intelligence into the apps as well. Any other questions? Yes? 

Audience 0:33:06.0: 

You mentioned Workflow. That's something still new for my organization to adopt with Anaplan. I'm curious to know, if you are to, let's say, fill a position and you want to trigger a workflow to say, okay, this is great, we've got somebody in the sales role, and we need to then figure out how to deploy them, because that's something that we also do in Anaplan, is that a feature that you've also built, and can that all be done? 

Annika McGraw 0:33:32.9: 

Yes, can you explain a little bit what you mean by deploy? 

Audience 0:33:36.8: 

Oh, sorry. Meaning have you assigned that particular salesperson in terms of what his or her responsibility would be. So, when we think about salespeople, in my organization we think about, okay, how do we then use as a resource, and maintain all of that within Anaplan? 

Annika McGraw 0:33:59.1: 

So, there's kind of a two-pronged answer to that, because it's a workforce problem and it's a go-to-market planning problem as well. So, on the workforce side, we use Workflow for things like a new position is created, there's a series of approvals that it has to go through. So, if it's just the middle of the year, I'm not in a planning cycle, and I need a new position, I think we all know that it's not as simple as raising your hand and asking for a new position. You've got to get HR approval, you've got to get your leadership approval, you've got to get finance to approve. So, we have a robust automated workflow capabilities in the Operational Workforce Planning app for exactly that. Now, once that new position is approved, once there is a worker hired and their ramping up and ready to go, it becomes more of an assignment thing, which I'll pass off to you in terms of the go-to-market planning. 

Thibaud Raucoules 0:35:03.5: 

Thank you. Yes, we've embedded Workflow through the process, the go-to-market process, so segmentation scoring, capacity, territory, quota, so to improve the target allocation, to approve the rep quota through the application already. You can always add more workflow as you extend on what's coming out of the books, but it's pretty much through the application any time we thought that an approval was needed. 

Annika McGraw 0:35:35.4: 

Any other questions? We'll take questions on Workflow, on Polaris. Okay. Requests for Thibaud to say my name again. 

Thibaud Raucoules 0:35:48.4: 

Annika McGraw.  

Annika McGraw 0:35:50.6: 

There you go.  

Thibaud Raucoules 0:35:55.1: 

All good?  

Annika McGraw 0:35:55.4: 

Okay. Well, we'll hang around a little bit, so if you have any other questions, come up and see us, but thank you for your time today. 

Thibaud Raucoules 0:36:01.1: 

Thank you. 

[Applause]