0:00:01.5: 

[Music.] 

 

Unknown Speaker 0:00:13.6: 

Welcome, welcome. We have a special surprise that's not on the printed agenda. We have GAP speaking with us today, so take it away. 

 

Trent Allen 0:00:23.2: 

Perfect. Good afternoon, everyone. To start, I will first introduce myself. I'm Trent Allen, I'm a senior director with Spaulding Ridge based out of Seattle. With me today is Etienne St-Martin from GAP Inc. We're going to talk to you guys a little bit about Etienne's marketing transformation with Anaplan over the last year. Before we jump in though to our fireside chat, Etienne, I'd love for you to just introduce yourself to the group. Thank you for your time today. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:00:48.6: 

Okay, thank you for introducing me. I'm happy to be here. I work for GAP. I've been a part of the marketing shared services team that supports the marketing operations for about two years now. I recently implemented Anaplan. We embarked on this journey about a year ago, and we've been live for about four months now with a user group of about 150 across 4 different functions. Managing hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing spend. It's been quite an undertaking, quite a journey. Yes, kind of feels a bit surreal to be here. I was spectating or attending last year, looking for clues on how the heck I was going to do this thing, and now I have the privilege of being here and explaining how I got to where I am. 

 

Trent Allen 0:01:42:  

Post implementation, to boot and ramping up. I think to really jump, start on that note Etienne, I mean, congratulations to the I think the company overall. I think the results in the industry in the last, what is it? Eight quarters now, the company's turned around from red to green has been incredible and also just bringing the vibe across the four brands of that Americano culture back to the GAP brand has seemed to really resonate in a very, very difficult macro-economic climate right now. I would love to just start our chat today and kind of explain to the audience if you wouldn't mind sharing, what started this journey for you and the marketing finance team? I mean, there's a lot of messages going around, how do you really help retailers grow and evolve in this kind of environment? A lot of folks are very heavily inundating around supply chain solutions, more of those merchant-facing solutions in recent years. What made you guys want to take a look at how you're managing the funnel of your spend across your medium mixes? 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:02:36.6: 

Yes, so our Anaplan instance is specifically focused on managing marketing spend, which obviously is the fuel to generating sales. The problem that we were facing that we had to start to really address was Excel. Everything was managed in Excel, as I'm sure that a lot of you can relate. The problem with that is that Excel is incredibly dynamic and nimble and easy to use, and that's also part of the problem. Is that there is no standardized approach on how marketing spend was managed and tracked for contacts that GAP has, for brands, Old Navy, GAP, Banana Republic and Athleta. Those brands all have their own charts. Everyone does things in the way that makes sense to them, and people have their own processes that they've been used to for more than a decade at this point. Trying to make sense of a portfolio when they're all different, and they don't necessarily connect through a common thread, was just challenging, and that was a problem that we needed to solve. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:03:48.6:  

For the first two or three months of my job, before I got into Anaplan, I was asked to consolidate information to present to leadership. When it takes me about a week to just put the numbers together to get that story, there's a problem. 

 

Trent Allen 0:04:02.7:  

Yes, makes sense, and I think you're telling the story of how you communicate value to your customers, right, and communicate value throughout the organization. It's a big shift culturally to turn that across those four brands, all, of course, you're talking various different sizes and scales. What were some of the main drivers, and what were some of the leading indicators to say, hey, outside of Excel, we have executive reporting, we have managing our media spend that we have to focus on? What were some of the driving factors at the team level? Like the actual planners, the channel planners between the three entities in the groups that you worked with that was really the driving force outside of reporting for you guys? Taking a look at the market, eventually choosing Anaplan and then starting this transformation partnership? 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:04:43.5:  

Yes, so I'll do my best to answer your question. At the end of the day, Anaplan was an enterprise tool of choice. When it got rolled into marketing and put onto my plate, it was already a decision that had been made as to us moving towards that tool. In some sense, it was a bit easier because it wasn't necessarily a suggestion or a choice; it was something that was happening. Which, honestly, I think, was the best that could have happened because, yes, we just got right into the build, and right into understanding the problem and how we were to address it. Now, having to use a tool and actually agree to use it are two different things. As I mentioned, we had a very wide user base across four distant groups who all have their own interests and priorities and opinions as to how things should be. They're all spread across four different brands. To make things matter even more difficult is that some of those users are more creative in nature, so they don't live in financial numbers. Another group was finance, and then another group was responsible for managing paid media. All of them have their own experiences and aversions to these types of tools. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:06:03.4: 

It was really a process of earning their trust, but also really hearing and understanding the user. Hearing about their experience, understanding what's not working today and trying to bridge that with Anaplan. To give them essentially like an internal sales pitch on, okay, this might not be as simple as Excel, but this is what I can do for you. Making their problem my own was key because, at the end of the day, they wanted to know that I was adding value to their workflow as opposed to handcuffing them to a tool that they wouldn't be able to get out of. My objective from the very start of this, which is what I articulated to the many SMEs that I was working with, was that I'm not happy until they're happy. That really established that notion of trust and really got the conversation focused on them as opposed to the objective of just getting them into a tool. 

 

Trent Allen 0:06:57.7: 

Yes, makes total sense. How did you guys carry that through, even the implementation? That kind of cultural transformation, I think that is one of the largest flips with Anaplan. Even if you're moving from Excel to the greatness and the modernization that Anaplan will bring as a platform, you are still working in that kind of open sandbox environment, right? Getting an understanding of that process, how did you guys facilitate, I mean, those four various brands of size and scale through the actual implementation and that transformation in that regard? 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:07:26.5:  

Yes, looking back on it, it feels like my approach was simple. Then, when I think about it, there were a lot of things that had to happen in order for me to get to where I am. Which is having folks in the tool submitting the results through Anaplan and having it connect to other Anaplan modules without having any friction or issues. Kind of taking a step back, before I started doing the Anaplan implementation. The thing that was just honestly key to my success was the fact that I had done, I had supported each of the teams for at least three to four months and understood the problems well before actually talking about Anaplan. My role had kind of bounced around when I was at GAP. My first three months was supporting the GAP brand, doing forecast submissions, building a budget for fiscal year 2025 and rolling that out. I was already quite familiar with the processes and the workflows, and the challenges. Then I moved onto another group and then another group, and then once I was tasked with Anaplan, I already understood what the problems were and how everything connected and how the picture would all fit together. I wasn't looking at it in terms of three or four distinct groups; I already had an idea as to how I would want this to work. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:08:46.5:  

I think the biggest struggle was that Anaplan, you know, when you start, you're kind of told that Anaplan can do anything. That's in and of itself challenging because if it can do anything, then you have to set your own guardrails as to what this is and what this is not and how this fits within your existing tooling stack and how people digest information. That took a while to figure out, but once we had that north star and that vision that we could work towards, that's when things became a lot easier. As we were evolving and operating in this open sandbox, it was a lot easier to say yes or no to specific asks or decisions when we knew where we were supposed to head and ultimately land. 

 

Trent Allen 0:09:28.8: 

Right, so kind of the common grounding to that north star was where you guys found that even foothold, going through, considering the fact you had multiple models and transformations and outside marketing, right? The integrated FP&A landscape in Anaplan, massive change across those four brands, so good that you have that alignment to that vision. I am curious, though, there's always the negative side, right? I'm curious to hear about your perspective to share with the group. What were some of the resistances you had? 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:09:53.6: 

Oh, we had a lot! 

 

Trent Allen 0:09:57.4: 

How did you curb those? How did you bring those brand partners along? Fifteen billion plus retailer, it's a lot of scope to move, it's a lot of strategic and tactical conversations that are coming along with the technological way of change. I'm curious to see what you guys ran into both culturally, operationally and that resistance point and how you looked to tackle those. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:10:15.1: 

There's a lot of things I could talk about! I think the big ones that jump out are… GAP has been around for a very long time, and a lot of its employees have been at the company for at least five years. That wasn't something that… I came from the tech world before working with GAP, where there is a much shorter turnaround with employees. With this company, people stuck around for a long time. What that did is that there's a lot of institutional knowledge, but people were very stuck to their ways. People who had been living in Excel for ten, fifteen years, who built the Excel file ten years ago and already saw it through different iterations, they didn't want to let that go because it was working for them. Resistance to change was a big one. I think that's just a general human tendency; people don't like change, they don't like the unknown. Especially when they're being told by someone who has not done their job that they should be doing this, there's resistance, so I definitely faced that. What I mentioned in terms of working with the various groups and earning their trust in terms of understanding and being able to talk their language, that had a huge impact. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:11:32.4: 

If I was on calls and somebody said, 'This isn't going to work because of X, Y and Z.' I'm able to finish their sentence by explaining why that is and what we could do to potentially fix it, it kind of left this impression with them, that, oh, I actually understand what they're doing, and I know what I'm talking about. As opposed to just taking orders and trying to put something together that ultimately makes the company look at in terms of implementation. There's a lot of resistance to change, there's a lot of fear of the unknown. Part of it is competing interests, so we're dealing with a single platform, so the issue that leadership had was we're living in a pretty dynamic environment now with the introduction of AI, things are moving at a lightning speed rate. We just needed to access information much more quickly than we were in the past to make very quick decisions. Leaders wanted somewhere to consolidate the information very quickly, but if you're talking to one person working in one department within one brand, they're already good with how quickly they get their information. To get them to understand why it's important that the people up top in leadership can understand what they're doing and how it all consolidates together, even though that doesn't necessarily impact them directly, it's still a challenge. People always want to know what's in it for them. Being very clear on that vision and always taking it people first, employee first approach was definitely a challenge, but also a good opportunity to keep myself in check. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:13:15.9: 

Making sure that whilst it adds value, I'm not building it. That's kind of the mantra that I operated by. I've had times where I love my Spaulding team, I love the GAP team, but there were times where I had to be the middle person, saying no to GAP employees who were asking for something that was a bad idea. That would basically recreate the Excel problems in Anaplan. Or I would have my Spauling partners recommending a functionality that looks good on paper, but from a workflow perspective, was not the right call. It was not going to be something that people liked, and I had to push back on that. I wouldn't have been able to do that if it wasn't for the fact that I understood how these things all worked and how everything fit together. Another thing, just not to go too much on a tangent, we have these processes and checkpoints to keep people engaged and to give them the opportunity to give us the feedback. When we were going through UAT, there were moments where there was one of our core pages that marketers would essentially live in. There was a situation where we built it, I didn't like how it was built, because it didn't feel very intuitive or easy. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:14:31.9: 

The marketing group didn't seem bothered by it, but they didn't seem excited either. We were asking them, do you have any issues with this or that? Always, it was, no, we're okay. I knew that they weren't okay, because I didn't like it. At some point, at the last minute UAT, I asked everyone on the call, and I just flat out told people, 'Do you like this because I don't know about you, I think all these things suck.' All of them just started talking, and they're like, 'Thank you so much for saying that. I didn't realize I could say these things, I thought I wasn't allowed to.' I was in some way like their Anaplan therapist, where I was allowing them… 

 

Trent Allen 0:15:13.7: 

[Laughs] 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:15:14.7:  

No, I'm serious, I was allowing them to share how they actually felt about the tool. They didn't think it was okay. The amount of times I went to brand finance and told them that this isn't working for me. How is this working for you? They were like, 'Oh, my God, thank you.' There was so many of those situations that I think that just ties into approach. You just need to be on top of what's happening, and you constantly need to be monitoring and temperature checking with everyone, how they're doing. Different users, and just constantly making sure that everyone's feeling good. Not just by asking them to highlight any complaints, but to also ask them very pointed questions. 

 

Trent Allen 0:15:59.0: 

It's very hard too, I think, if you're a sponsor, writer, a champion of a major transformation, and you go from a world where, hey, I've been in Excel for 20, 30 years. I've been doing this my legacy way for however long across my brands. You start getting put into a platform, and you start thinking already mentally, I'm put in a box, right? I think that re-education, that re-establishment of, yes, I have a good understanding of your processes, I have a good understanding of your vision. The platform provides the flexibility and the performance you need, but I think it's that reminder of that collaboration and that sharing of ideas to say, we're not just going to lift and shift your Excel over. We need to challenge those norms, but it's finding that middle point there. I'm glad to see that you guys were able to gracefully negotiate that. Obviously, still with its bumps and challenges, but getting on the other side is there. I'd like to, thinking about trying to help educate the group here, let's talk about how you guys are managing the top and the rear funnel. 

 

Trent Allen 0:16:52.1: 

For those who aren’t familiar with media spend, going through and following these implementation principles, how you guys got the marketing finance model established within your integrated FP&A space with Anaplan? What are you truly monetizing value, basing the model on now? How are you guys managing your media mix better? What kind of insights has it enabled for your team to that point of you have a lot of various Excel files, it was difficult for you guys to consolidate information and build that management reporting? What are some of those…? Not necessarily having to share details of figures or anything, but what are those unlocks in terms of the insights, in terms of that collaboration or turning the page in the ways of working that the team is experiencing today? 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:17:35.1: 

I think the biggest ones are in terms of visibility. We now have instantaneous access to information that either didn't exist, existed across some brands but not others, because some people didn't really see the importance of tracking it. Or just, again, it took a really long time to compile. In terms of how we have our data set up, we spent a really, really long time, and I can't emphasize how important defining the taxonomy is. I was really excited about getting into Anaplan, and you think that unless you start building, you're behind. I think there's a kind of value in planning because once you build it, it's hard to come back from it, and it's a lot of money, so make sure you know what you're doing. We spent a really long time understanding what are the different data layers that people care about. That involved probably a two-month process where we brought all the directors into a room. We floated around the structure that we wanted to implement and introduce, and asked them to refine and tweak the ones they did or didn't want to see. For us, the high-level buckets that we've associated to every line of data in relation to marketing spend is working versus non-working spend. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:18:57.9: 

Then we have markets of US versus Canada, expression, which tests what kind of store is it, channel, online versus retail, since we've got retail stores. Then we had all these other layers of data that are nested underneath. For example, if we're talking about a content production, which is how we create our seasonal campaign material. There are degrees of information that we need beneath that, so if we need to know what we spent on models, or non-seasonal campaigns or post-production or that sort of thing. Those are the categories that we've nested into Anaplan, so that when people enter their information, they can't bypass that, but they have to start thinking about the business in this way. In some ways, in a lot of ways, we've unlocked our ability to access information, but in others, we've actually introduced significant change that wouldn't have been possible in Excel. Now, we're forcing people to consider a different way of looking at things. When they do that, at first they're resistant, but then shortly after, they start buying in, and they see that it's a lot more useful for them to have things tracked in a specific way. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:20:17.6: 

That's generally how we've built the data structure, so that we can slice and dice things in various different ways. When it comes to paid media, which is one of our biggest areas of spend, we've got it broken down by channel, awareness, consideration, or convergence spend. Then we had a bunch of tactics, like channels through which we spend marketing dollars, whether it's Facebook or Instagram or whatever it is. We have things categorized under those buckets so that at any point in time, we can go into the tool and see what we've spent. Which again sounds simple, but it's something that used to be quite a significant undertaking. Being in Anaplan, it's so easy to flow data from one page to another that we've even integrated the data that we're getting from our company planning team, who sets the goals for the channel planners who manage the spend. We've brought that information in so that we can compare and contrast what's the goal versus the forecast, and how close are we to it, and how much more money do we need to actually meet that objective? Which, again, is something that used to take a really long time to do. Now you can get it within a click of a button because it's all logic. 

 

Trent Allen 0:21:37.7: 

You're kind of setting that organic tone, right? For how your offering or the assortments across the brands are going to resonate financially and through your paid media and those advertising channels. I think phenomenal transformation has its ups and downs going through the brands. I'm curious, before we start opening it up for Q&A here to the group. Looking back, we've talked about benefits, what we saw as key successes for your implementation. For any of those that are jumping new in and saying, outside of this experience, if you were to go back and rewind time to day one, what are some of the core tenets that you would do differently? Some good things to seed and leave with this audience to say if you're coming in fresh to Anaplan what are some key tenets that you would advise folks on to set them up to succeed? 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:22:19.7: 

I'm thinking about the question around what would I do differently, because I actually, and I don't often say this, I don't think there's… There were hiccups, but I think that was necessary as being part of the process. The approach that I took was always this is my product and I'm not putting my name behind something that I'm not proud of. Operating under that approach just led to me never settling for less than what I wanted to create. I think the advice that I would give is, and I've said this before, have a vision, know what you're building, why you're building it and how it's going to work. You can only really do that if you're deeply integrated with those teams that you're supporting. If you're not, then everyone's situation will be different, but I was dealing with a user group of over 100. If I'm taking recommendations from over 100 people on building a single tool, it's going to work like a giant mess. I need to understand what's the objective and what's the single approach that we can take to meet everyone's needs. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:23:35.2: 

It's not going to be perfect for everyone. Some people will always hate it, but at the end of the day, is this doing what it's supposed to? That's one. I would say in terms of, like number two, I think it's as much of a people problem as it is about tooling, so build relationships with people. The amount of times that I was on calls where I thought they were going to chew me up because it just didn't look good. Or this was the fourth time that they were having to come back and tell me that something broke. I jump on a call, apologize, immediately give them white-glove service. The amount of times they would leave the call, like, thank you so much for everything that you're doing, I really appreciate that. I was kind of confused, to be completely honest, because I'm like, you guys should be upset, and they weren't upset. I think a lot of that came through the relationships that I had with these people. They knew that I cared. They knew that I was there to actually do something that was of value to them. They knew that I had the competence to actually do it. That had a huge impact, I think that really saved me in a lot of instances. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:24:44.9: 

The other thing I'll say is, sweat the small stuff. It's one thing to build the functionality, but it's another to put yourself in the shoes and understand how will teams interact with this? How will teams leave comments? How will they hand off this information to other team members? That's where things fell apart in some cases, where we built this really cool… I think that would be it. Think about workflows early on and understand them early on. Don't just think about the output, but think about, yes, the micro-interactions with the tool because that, in some cases, ended up being the thing that led to us going back to the drawing board. It looks good, but people can't use it and this isn't how they work. 

 

Trent Allen 0:25:34.9: 

Yes, almost the ecosystem outside of the technology is so much more of an influencing factor of your success than even within the four walls of Anaplan itself. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:25:42.7: 

Exactly. 

 

Trent Allen 0:25:43.0: 

It sounds like that flexibility was a big on mark for you all as an organization, keeping your business happy and in terms of responding to those changing requests across the brands. I think with that, I appreciate being open to my grill session here, Etienne, so thank you. I know we have about ten minutes left here in the group, so happy to open it up for any questions for Etienne or myself. 

 

Audience 0:26:08.9: 

Hi, I'm actually having conversations with my marketing, finance and ops team to see if we could leverage existing Anaplan modelling to do our own marketing forecasting a little bit better as well. In my case, the problem we're trying to solve is not just using the tool to do more robust marketing forecasting, but also to connect it back to our financial forecasting and expense forecasting. Do you have that in place today, or is your vision to also to go down that path? Due to that, how do you have that integration structure today pulling some of those potentially actual campaign data, or vendors and all that? 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:26:57.8: 

Just to repeat the question back to me, to make sure I understood. You're asking how data, how the forecast connects to the forecast submission process and how actualization gets looped back in and how that stuff all ties in together. 

 

Audience 0:27:12.3: 

Yes, correct, because we're also trying to see if we can use Anaplan to drive the accountability on the marketing team, 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:27:19.9: 

Right. Yes, right. Yes, we do have that all connected. The big deliverable was making sure that Anaplan submitted its forecast. People did their forecast in Anaplan and were able to submit it through Anaplan to the other module that consolidated results, which would get presented to leaders. That we've been able to do. The challenge that we originally had in doing that was that our Anaplan instance… The reason why we went into Anaplan was that previously, data was tracked either on Excel sheets or by chartered accounts. The chartered accounts is way more summarized than how to spend is actually invested. Anaplan marketing was where we really blew that up. Then, when we connected back to what we call the BU model, which consolidated everything, that was adding much more consolidated… It was at the COA level. Finding how we were going to bridge the two took a bit of time, but we eventually did successfully, and we also have the teams. We also bring Oracle month-end actuals into Anaplan. People can shore up and actualize the forecast in way more detail against the Oracle totals that are coming in so that Anaplan is never out of sync with the actuals. 

 

Trent Allen 0:28:46.5: 

Perfect, alright. Any other questions? 

 

Audience 0:28:59.5: 

God, okay. Now that you've gotten through the first phase, and what are you excited about? Now that you know what Anaplan is. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:29:12.4: 

I'm excited about a lot of things. Now that we have data in, it's like, what do we do with it? The thing that I'm really excited about is using AI to analyze data. I've already played around with how does Claude interact with this information. What kind of flexibility or insights can we get? I mean, I don't know how many of you have used Claude, but it's pretty incredible. To be able to do that and define more and more ways to expand how much information we're storing in Anaplan and how we leverage that to make better decisions. Right now, Anaplan is used to track spend, but our plan is to eventually bring in sales numbers so that we can merge those two together and then start running more complex ROI comparisons between where we spend our dollars and the return we generate across the brands. To then determine are we assigning dollars, are we properly, efficiently assigning dollars across our different brands? Or do we need to rethink that? That's something that we now have the ability to do, but we just need to put more emphasis on that. That's one thing, it's like expanding on that baseline. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:30:28.7: 

In terms of new features or functionality I want to build into Anaplan beyond what we've already done, I think that, again, I'm going to sound like every other person, saying AI. I think that there's a lot of opportunities to find ways to build in Anaplan using AI. I know that you and I were talking about the CoModeler, where I think that would be a huge on mark as being able to have more flexibility with the information and being able to just be more responsive. In a tool that's very well structured, but also in some ways that structure limits flexibility in certain ways, and that's the problem we're trying to solve. How do we get both? 

 

Trent Allen 0:31:18.9: 

Alright. Any other questions from the group? 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:31:29.6: 

Is anyone here…? I was going to ask, how many of you here are currently going through an Anaplan implementation? Or are you…? Okay. How's it going? 

 

Audience 0:31:37.4: 

[Laughter] 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:31:39.6: 

Okay! 

 

Trent Allen 0:31:40.7: 

Alright, well, thank you all very much for your time. Etienne, thank you so much for joining us for this talk. I appreciate it very much. 

 

Etienne St-Martin 0:31:49.0: 

Thank you. 

 

Audience 0:31:51.6: 

[Applause.]