Dana Therrien 0:00:02.6:  

Thank you for joining Spencer and myself. My name is Dana Therrien, and I've been with Anaplan for going on six years. I'm one of the resident experts, because we've hired a lot of people, on sales performance management and revenue performance management. I've spent most of my career leading sales and revenue operations functions for lots of different companies, and then also worked for Forrester leading a research and advisory practice. I joined Anaplan six years ago, because they were just looking for somebody that understood the types of problems that they were looking to solve for sales and revenue operations professionals, so I bring that perspective. I'm also a former Anaplan customer. There's people in the audience, I can see Alex Nayberg here, who worked for me, actually rescued me at one point in my career with a Anaplan solution. I'm here to interview Spencer today, so Spencer, let me hand it over to you, and now you can introduce yourself. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:00:56.0: 

Sure, good afternoon everyone. My name is Spencer Hodson, so I'm with a company called Ping Identity. I've been in the sales ops, RevOps area for about 20 years, and I started actually with Cisco Systems, Cisco with a C, based here actually in San Jose. I spent a number of years there working primarily in sales operations, sales business planning, strategic planning. I've done also a couple of startups, and now really resting my laurels in the cybersecurity space. I've been with Ping Identity now for about five years. Originally at ForgeRock before we merged together, brought out by private equity at Thoma Bravo, which Anaplan is a sister company, and based actually in Dallas. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:01:46.9: 

By the way, Spencer told me these chairs are a little shaky, so we'll just put one leg on the ground. As you can see, I'm a little more [unclear word 0:01:53.0] than Spencer is. Why don't you start by just telling us a little bit more about Ping and how we might know you. It's probably one of these quiet companies that we use ourselves and we just don't know it. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:02:04.6: 

Yes, happy to. Ping Identity, we are in the cybersecurity space. We specialize primarily in identity and access management, so we secure and manage digital identities across users, devices, applications, to ensure really a seamless and secure experience. We are very enterprise, large enterprise focused. We have over half of the Fortune 100, for example, companies actually deployed and using our technology. I think probably one of the also key areas, distinction about this from our competitors in this space is that we are pretty agnostic when it comes to deployment. We have SaaS, we have a very healthy SaaS model, but we also have on-prem or hybrid. That's very, very applicable particularly for large enterprises that may be in various deployment modes. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:03:00.1: 

You mentioned that we're both Thoma Bravo-held companies, and I know that they don't invest in companies that aren't high growth or where they don't see high potential. How big is the company just in terms of revenue and then the number of employees, and what kind of growth are you guys experiencing? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:03:13.5: 

Again, I started off at ForgeRock. We merged together, so combined company, we merged actually in August of '23. Now we're approaching in total ARR almost $1 billion. We're growing at about top line over 20 per cent, but we're also very profitable, so we're tapping on the door right now of rule of 50. Both our growth and our profitability or EBITDA margin, we're actually pretty close to 50 per cent, which is very, very exciting. We have about, let's see, we have over 2400 customers. Again, mostly enterprise, large enterprise, and just for scale, about 220 quota carrying sellers. We have a global presence roughly about half in Americas, probably 30% in EMEA, and then 20% in APJ. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:04:07.8: 

Why don't you just tell us a little bit about your role and what you do for the company, and then what your remit is? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:04:15.7: 

As I mentioned, I started off in sales ops for 20 years, and that's pretty much what I've been doing. Specializing particularly in areas as we grow of, as you can imagine, account planning, comp design, quota allocation. We've looked at various aspects when it comes to sales operations, and now been partnering pretty closely with our marketing and our customer success to actually truly build out a RevOps function, so we're interrelated across the different functions overall. Certainly I think with the merging of our two companies together, as I mentioned, last year, a lot of time was spent on territory and account planning, as you can imagine. Given if you've ever gone through any integration, you have a lot of overlap, a lot of quota and territory design, account segmentation. All the things I think if you participated in the morning session this morning, we've gone through it in terms of scoring, looking at customer account segmentation. How do we actually ensure that every territory is set up for success, and also aligns with our ideal customer profile? 

 

Dana Therrien 0:05:28.6: 

In revenue operations, I've seen a number of different models where you have a central revenue operations group where sales operations, marketing operations, customer success operations, all report into a single leader, but then there's another model that I call the coalition of the willing. You've got these individuals from these different groups understanding that you have common goals, especially because there's such a need in a SaaS-based company to understand the customer journey from, let's say, lead all the way through renewal. It sounds like you have a coalition of the willing, of individuals who are trying to collaborate more closely to one another. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:05:59.6: 

That's exactly right, and it's a good coalition of the willing. We all get along. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:06:03.7: 

Yes, that's a good thing. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:06:04.9: 

I think what was really unique, and talking a little bit about our Anaplan journey, is we actually, going back to the ForgeRock days, we actually started off in FP&A. They started looking at us for capital budgeting, expense management, and so forth. I've always known, being in sales operations for as long as I have, Anaplan was always certainly the Cadillac, if you will, when it comes to territory and account planning. That's where we started, and then we started really proliferating a number of our different models, whether it be forecasting pipeline management, looking at sales capacity, and so forth, and interconnecting with finance. Now we're starting to deal with marketing, customer success, and so forth, so back to your point. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:06:44.0: 

The Anaplan journey started with ForgeRock? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:06:46.7: 

It did. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:06:47.6: 

Okay. What size company was it at that point? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:06:50.4: 

I joined ForgeRock, this is in 2020. We were about 150 ARR company, and then once we merged with Thoma Bravo, we were like, 280. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:07:05.2: 

You saw $180 million worth of growth in that period of time? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:07:07.6: 

In about three, three and a half years, yes. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:07:09.5 

Post pandemic? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:07:10.5: 

Yes, or almost during the pandemic.  

 

Dana Therrien 0:07:13.4: 

Wow. Are you the person that brought Anaplan in? Were you our champion? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:07:18.0: 

Well, I'd like to say it was, but no, finance really. We were very fortunate to have a wonderful Anaplan partner that did a lot of the model building and deployment with our FP&A team, and then they extended and we started working with them. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:07:36.1: 

I like to talk a lot about too how Anaplan finds its way into companies, because when you're trying to work across silos like that, sometimes it's difficult to figure out who's going to fund the project. You said FP&A started, and then sales came on board after. I know we have a lot of people who are either trying to bring Anaplan into their company today or expand it into other areas. How do they work out that partnership between sales and finance, and how do you split the bill? Tell us about that. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:08:06.6: 

Yes, so again, finance started their first deployment on this. Fortunately we just had a really good working relationship, and when we started looking at some of the initial models that we wanted around territory and account planning and pipeline management and sales forecasting, we looked at, look, we know this is going to be a platform play. We want to commit for a three-year, because we knew we can get a good price for our Anaplan folks, but also we wanted to make sure we had enough workspace and so forth. We just worked it out and evolved, because we're rapidly working with the same partner to build out our models so we can really have a connected view. I think which was very helpful was that when it came to sales capacity, this is worth from an expense management from commissions, which also was running from our finance team. They wanted to have visibility in our models and we wanted to have some visibility in there, so that naturally brought us together. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:09:03.7: 

Yes, and I think one of the relationships that's often overlooked in a revenue operating model is that relationship between sales and finance, or the go to market functions and finance. It's such a critical connection point between those two organizations, because my experience has been that finance sometimes will build that plan on their own, the one that's eventually going to get handed over to the sales organization and turned into a quota and allocation model. Are you working in the same models together, or are you handing information backwards and forwards between sales and finance so that there's not that swivel chair that occurs there? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:09:36.7: 

We are, absolutely. Yes, and I know you're a Thoma Bravo company as well. As part of their methodology, if you will, there's a quota allocation model. That is I guess a philosophy we have. We have to actually build in Anaplan that we share collectively across finance and sales to really understand, how do we make sure we have enough quota out on the street, if you will, when we look at capacity planning and so forth? Of course, we look at all those support costs as well that comes with that, and ensuring we have the right ratios and so forth. There's a good hand and check sort of balance there. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:10:16.5: 

I work for a Thoma Bravo company now, but in a previous life I ran sales ops for a Thoma Bravo company. That quota allocation model is really like a capacity model that they've constructed. It's part of their fundamental process of investing in companies where they dictate, I would say to a certain level, the number of salespeople you're going to have, where you're going to deploy them, and it was a massive spreadsheet that we had to fill out ten years ago when I did it. You guys have automated that in Anaplan, and I think you've become a model in the portfolio of companies where they're actually using Anaplan. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:10:50.6: 

We told we would license the model. No, but that's exactly right. When we came together with Thoma Bravo, they were Ping legacy. Ping Identity was already owned by Bravo. They were doing it in spreadsheets, and anytime you made a change it would take at least a day, two days, to work through it. Now that we've built that in Anaplan and now that we have finance in it, we can make different scenario planning and different investment theses and different analysis really quickly. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:11:20.6: 

Yes, and the capacity planning, what I've also seen in my own career and also working with other companies is headcount is often one of the most difficult things to get your hands around. How many people are with us today? How many have left? How many are on ramp? How many do we expect to hire? When do we expect to hire them? It's all tied to an OpEx plan, so are you integrated with the sales organization on that? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:11:42.4: 

Hundred per cent, so sales, not only sales, finance, but also HR really, because we look at open recs, we look at those that accepted. We build that into the QAM, into the quota allocation model, and we report that back to Thoma Bravo, because it's so tightly managed and so visible. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:11:58.8: 

Are you able to answer that question when you get the call from the chief sales officer of the company, how many people do we have on board right now? How many are ramping? Where are we with all these recs? When do we expect to hire? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:12:07.8:  

Absolutely. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:12:09.6: 

Are you able to make the types of decisions, because oftentimes we do an annual financial plan and then things change throughout the year, and maybe your forecast has gone up. It sounds like that's a problem that you guys have. How do you adjust your headcount plan throughout? Because you can't stay with a static headcount plan if you're finding that the market is starting to respond more quickly to what you are. You'll get behind on capacity, so what does that look like? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:12:33.7: 

That's a great point actually, Dana. We still have our annual planning, we still have our budgeting process, but as we look at it, we're always planning for the next year. We typically do a bi-, or sort of every six months we're reviewing. Right now I'm already reviewing, for example, our headcount and capacity and growth for next year. Do we want to start hiring now and pull forward heads? Because we're focusing on large enterprise, the hiring cycles, the sales cycles are typically longer, so we have to have that little bit longer range planning. What we're looking at right now, is how do we actually pull forward heads against our '26 plan? Get them basically already in the seat at the end of Q3/Q4, so they hit the ground running. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:13:17.6: 

I think that's probably one of the biggest changes I've seen in my career, is that you would abide by a strict OpEx plan for the entire fiscal year. You weren't allowed to change it until the end of the fiscal year, regardless of what happened in market conditions. If you're not in a position to start hiring ahead of growth, you can't do that until the beginning of the next fiscal year, and you're already behind. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:13:35.7: 

You're already behind, especially if it takes you, in certain international markets it could take us four months really from the time we start recruiting to the time we actually have someone in the chair, and then you've got the ramp period in terms of their enablement and being fully productive. This is actually a great advantage. We're fortunate that Thoma Bravo sees it the same way. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:13:55.2: 

You could never catch up. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:13:56.3: 

That's right. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:13:57.9: 

I think that's probably one of the greatest innovations that came out of the SaaS revolution, the ability to just see what was happening from beginning to end and make adjustments throughout the fiscal year. I know you and I have had conversations in the past where you don't really think about it so much as annual sales planning or go to market planning anymore. It's more like dynamic planning. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:14:16.5: 

It's getting close. I wouldn't say it's quite there, but it's pretty close. I think right now we look at it every six months. I'd like to make it quarterly, and then we do our headcount management every month. We're updating the QAM, we have to report that, but I really think from a pull forward from a capacity standpoint, I'd like to get to a point we're at least doing that every quarter then. Almost see it as like a mini AOP, annual operating plan, but it's really a quarterly operating plan. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:14:41.0: 

You're using us for sales forecasting, so that gives you the ability to tie back into planning and also headcount capacity. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:14:46.5: 

That's right. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:14:48.3: 

We just talked a lot about the different ways that you're using Anaplan, and the audience has had an opportunity to look at the honeycomb that we had behind us. Just to expand on it now a little bit, just walk us through your journey and how that happened. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:15:00.7: 

Yes, so going on the far left, again, when I joined ForgeRock. We didn't really have, I mean, there's different forecasting tools out there, Clari, etc. We didn't have anything, so knowing that we were going to start with territory and account planning, I wanted to actually leverage Anaplan for our forecasting. We built forecasting and pipeline models that were actually pretty sophisticated. Again, we had a great partner that really helped us with that, so we can actually look at, how much pipeline do we need to generate now that our bookings plan 18 months out, and be able to have those views down, even at a territory level. It would update, of course, as you improve your sales execution, improve your conversion rates and so forth. You would need less pipeline, because you're converting higher, and then we can model that out. That was where we started, and then when we went through, I think you've all experienced this. Right when the pandemic, when we started to come out of it 2021/22, there was a great resignation. We had sales churn, AE churn probably like 35 per cent, almost 40 per cent. It was just godawful, so we really then built a model around AE performance and development where we really wanted to look at the health of the territory and the health of an AE. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:16:17.5: 

How do we make sure that an account executive is set up for success? We'd also have warning lights. For example, we looked at their pipeline. How much pipeline are they generating? How's their territory? We scored their territory. How much is the support teams, whether it be STRs, partners also helping contributing to your pipeline generation, pipeline progression? All of these health metrics, if you will, as well as we had each of the sales directors, the sales managers, do check-ins. They did check-ins twice a quarter and then give a review, and all of this was documented within Anaplan. Every quarter during our quarterly business reviews with the leadership, we would actually put up their whole sales team and actually review it. Then red, yellow, green, the greens are going, okay, maybe they're a potential bench that we want to develop for future sales managers. The reds, obviously want to address that. Is it a PIP? Are they set up for success? We would have very detailed conversations to highlight, where are we basically setting up the AEs? Where we maybe have, frankly, some issues in terms of performance that we need to be more proactive in dealing with, and then where can we help support and maybe take some of the yellows, for example, and then make sure they're happy and retained. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:17:32.8: 

So many companies are using quota attainment as the sole indication of performance. It sounds to me like you guys are using a lot of leading indicators and lagging indicators, like quota attainment, to do a full assessment of sales performance to sales productivity. Is that right? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:17:47.0: 

That's right, along with the qualitative check, which is the sales manager. They talk to them, they work with them every day. It's important to get that check-in and that feedback, and it's helped. We were able to lower our attrition from, like I said, about 38 per cent. We got it down to about 22 per cent at the time of merger, which is good. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:18:03.6: 

Because you were able to just look at those early warning signs and then give them some assistance, so that they didn't find themselves in a position where they had to leave because they just weren't doing well. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:18:12.8: 

Yes, and I think classic example, we were reviewed at the QBR and we'd say, okay, this rep is really challenged, but we looked at the support team and maybe their STR wasn't really, because we have a ratio of three to one, four to one. I'm sure many in here have something like that, and maybe that STR really wasn't, or maybe disproportionately working with other reps. How do we lean into that? Maybe we hired in and maybe we looked at ways we can bring I guess a better success proposition for the support teams. It highlighted it, right? 

 

Dana Therrien 0:18:41.5: 

It's such a travesty when you're making headcount decisions about who's going to stay and who's going to go. Unfortunately you have to do that sometimes, but if you do it just purely based upon quota attainment, you might have somebody that's not yet at quota attainment, but if you look at their leading indicators, they're almost there. To let someone like that go, all you're doing is starting that cycle all over again. If you don't have the visibility into that, that's really kind of the… 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:19:03.6: 

Yes, and I think that's probably the overall theme. If you look at this journey here, we wanted to empower our first-line sales managers with enough data, the right data that they can then make some decisions on, and also just be better managers of their business. Many times, and we still are a victim of this as well, they have too many point solutions out there. They're going to this screen for that, that screen for this, this tool for this. One of the things I think Anaplan really helped us with is, how do we kind of give it, maybe it's at two or three screens of data and views in a lot of different ways that they can actually act on it, and just not have to go in these different point and click, one-trick solutions for the same thing? 

 

Dana Therrien 0:19:44.5: 

I mentioned I was at Forrester prior to joining Anaplan, and I was doing a lot of research, because I saw it happening. There was a need to start to converge these operations functions across the go to market functions, from sales to sales operations, marketing operations, revenue, customer success operations, and they were all buying individual point solutions. Me personally, I just got frustrated by the lack of integration between those solutions and also the amount of money people were spending on these different point solutions that weren't connected to one another. I had an opportunity to go to other companies, but I came to Anaplan because of the platform. What I see here is you did exactly what I was hoping was going to happen, where instead of investing in these individual disconnected point solutions, you invested in a platform, and now you're able to connect this mosaic of different, call it models or whatever you want to call them, together and leverage information and work and workflow across all of them. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:20:39.7: 

That's exactly right. Again, I would say we're just becoming more connected as an enterprise. As we stood up some different models, we were able to cost justify it with our CFO in terms of turning off and retiring some tools. That I think helped just for the tech debt that we have. I think we all probably have different point solutions and things that we've just got to retire, but also just get a better ROI out of the investment that we've already made. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:21:05.7: 

Do you have a group of individuals in the company that are dedicated to Anaplan and sustaining it and growing it, and continue to expand it? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:21:12.8: 

In terms of model building and things like that? 

 

Dana Therrien 0:21:14.1: 

Model building and things. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:21:14.7: 

We're right at that transition right now. Like I said, we were really spoiled because we have a great partner, but we actually have, in fact, if there's any model builders in here, we have two recs open right now, pingidentity.com. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:21:30.6:  

I see a guy in the audience you've got to talk to. I'm going to introduce you to him after this! 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:21:35.8: 

Absolutely, so we're looking to bring on two model builders and maybe transition into building that in-house. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:21:40.8:  

You can kind of rule the world, can't you, once you have those model builders in place. We work with other companies, Amazon Web Services has done that, where they've got a federated model where they've got a group of model builders that are constantly going out there and seeking opportunities to improve efficiency across the company. When they're autonomous like that, they have the ability to do that. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:21:58.8: 

Yes, we're right at that scale now, and given that we have five different departments or functions to actually use Anaplan for different models, we're at that scale where it makes sense. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:22:07.3: 

Okay. Now's the opportunity, you've got a lot of people who are interested in either growing their Anaplan usage, or they're going to delve into it for the first time. Speak to them, tell them what they need to know. Give them some of your great tips on what you've learned.  

 

Spencer Hodson 0:22:24.0: 

Depending on where you start, make sure you just understand your use case. I can give you countless examples where you can get scope creep on the use case. As an example, when we were just building out forecasting, it was pretty clear what we needed from - and we're an ARR company, so if you're a SaaS company you probably know what I'm talking about. We had to look at our overall business just from a new ARR, also uplift and then churn, and build that into our forecast, using different, our sort of methodology that we use. It was very clear that if we weren't really set on the use case to build initial design - prototype it first, get all the feedback from the different stakeholders - you would waste a lot of time, because you don't want to be basically trial and error in Anaplan. You almost want to prototype it first, get the use case, get the stakeholders' buy-in, and then when you build the model as you roll out, you phase it out. Seems pretty common sense, but you'd be surprised how much, once you start building, how much the scope creep can step in, and you wind up just getting a little bit of a sprawl and not being effective in terms of releasing. Enablement and change management is also another area we're definitely focused on. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:23:40.5: 

Can I pause on that? You just made it sound so simple, because in sales and revenue operations, we're often thinking about our forecasts as being strictly opportunity forecasts. You mentioned one of our competitors where they're just rolling up these, what are you going to book this week? Then you put your judgment on top of it, you submit it, and then your manager puts a judgment on top of that, and then it ends from there, but it sounds to me like you're doing end-to-end forecasting. You're looking at the opportunities in the pipeline. You're looking at the churn that's predicted to come out of the customer success organization, and then you're projecting that into probably a waterfall that's going to turn into a revenue forecast as well. Is that right? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:24:16.3: 

That's exactly right. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:24:17.0: 

Yes, so that's really where we aspire to go, to connect that opportunity forecast to that churn. We know when churn goes up, bookings need to go up, and then the revenue forecast goes down. It sounds to me like it's all interconnected in what you guys do. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:24:32.2:  

Very much, and there's always areas to improve, but again, getting back to what I would advise for anyone stepping into it, just be very focused on your use case. Have the stakeholders' feedback. When you roll it out, make sure there's commitment and enablement adoption. That was really the lessons learned for us. We rolled out a territory plan, or go to market kick-off, sales kick-off at the start of this year. Roll it out all new territories, how basically an AE is going to make their number during the year. It brought in all the pipeline, all their accounts, how they're going to focus, filling out their territory plans, but the change management was pretty intense. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:25:11.2: 

Did your sellers leave sales kick-off with a quota and territory and compensation plan in hand? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:25:15.6: 

Hundred per cent, yes. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:25:17.7: 

You're speaking like that's not a big deal either.  

 

Spencer Hodson 0:25:20.1: 

It was a lot of work, and by the way, our go to market kick-off, we're on a calendar fiscal, so our go to market kick-off is January 20th. They all had comp plans, they all had territory plans, basically three weeks into the new year. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:25:32.0: 

Yes, and we saw that from the main stage, and there's also all kinds of other research that's out there. When you fast start a fiscal year, you're far more productive than you would be if your sales organization is waiting for quotas through the end of the first fiscal quarter. You lose the whole quarter because of it. Now, as you're going through a planning process, all of your executives inside the company, I'm sure they're making decisions on time, and they never reverse those decisions all the way through the planning cycle, and that just makes it easy for you to roll out the quotas. Is that how you guys were able to achieve that? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:26:03.7: 

We were governed, as you know, by Thoma Bravo, so we had to have everything basically approved by early December. We already worked with Salesforce in territory design. Anaplan was just a manifestation of what's in Salesforce. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:26:17.7: 

Are you able to respond to those micro changes that might occur throughout the process and say, hey, we've changed the oversight number for next year? I've sort of given up. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:26:27.5: 

We did. We have a little bit of tolerance, so we could do it. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:26:29.8:  

Expecting them to deliver everything on time, because they're under a lot of pressure as well, you just need a platform that gives you the ability to model new changes quickly so that you don't miss your deadline. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:26:38.6: 

Yes. I think the biggest challenge - I think you've all probably experienced this - is when you're adding sales territories. There's innate response from sales managers to say, well, or certainly AEs, 'I don't want to give up accounts.' That's part of the growth, and so you've got to divide territories, you've got to look at how to make sure it's equitable and so forth. Anaplan has been very helpful by empowering, because we built that already with the sales managers. I really want to empower them to make the decision. We'll tee it up, we'll look at the data, make some recommendations, but they ultimately can make the decision in terms of which accounts go where to fully optimize. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:27:16.7: 

Then you give them some boundaries and say, okay, you've got $5 million worth of quota to allocate, here's how we think you should do it. You have some discretion that gives you the ability to move those things around in Anaplan or Zoom, and then you send it back up. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:27:28.5: 

That's exactly right, and then they could always pick and choose, they want to move this account. There may be an account they want to transfer, but if they have a large opportunity, because it's enterprise it could not close for another six months, well, you don't want to basically penalize the rep that's brought that opportunity to that point. We had different holdover and comp schemes that make sure you have that sort of integrity. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:27:51.6: 

That's such a great point too. You've been doing this… 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:27:55.3: 

Too long! 

 

Dana Therrien 0:27:56.8: 

If you find yourself in a position where you make those types of mistakes, let's just say that you're insensitive to what a salesperson has put into previous opportunities and you just start moving them around. Not only does that opportunity lose momentum, but you probably lose that sales rep too, and then you're starting over from scratch. It's a huge productivity hit. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:28:15.5: 

It is. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:28:17.4: 

Having this information at your fingertips I think gives you the ability to be a little bit more sensitive to those types of changes. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:28:22.0: 

That's right. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:28:24.2: 

We talked about capacity planning, true end-to-end forecasting that includes finance. I've worked for so many organizations where the sales organization hands the forecast over to finance, and the first thing they do is throw it out, and then they apply their own metrics to it. I would assume that you're pretty tightly aligned. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:28:40.5: 

Very tight. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:28:42.5: 

All from Anaplan? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:28:43.7: 

All from Anaplan, and I would say, I realize we're sort of rare, but we roll up a forecast, it's gospel. It's not questioned. Now, of course you've got to keep hitting your numbers, because if you don't, well, then your credibility goes out. There's not like finances are forecast, so on and so forth. We only have one forecast. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:29:06.7: 

So strategy and planning, QAM is something else that you're doing, and territory and quota let's say setting. Are you also managing quotas throughout the year in Anaplan, where when you have people who leave the company, then you're reallocating that quota? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:29:19.4: 

Well, yes and no. Again, this is Thoma Bravo. Within the QAM, it's based on tenure. We know that reps have been in the role for three-plus years, have a certain quota allocation that we govern. If they're new onboarding reps, for example, then they really, really have a much lower quota, so it's standardized, and then depending on when they join, they're ramped during the course of the year. It's almost dictated, which is nice. Obviously where we run into some issues where we just have to realign some things is where if we have any attrition, that maybe we have some ten-year reps going out and you have new reps coming in, well, there's not enough quota on the street. How do we make sure that there's enough over assign for the sales director to feel comfortable that they can still hit their number? 

 

Dana Therrien 0:30:10.5: 

Yes, and really quotas, like writing a check off the company check book, if it's not properly allocated all the time, then you're either going to overspend or underspend. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:30:18.0: 

That's right, and we monitor that every week.  

 

Dana Therrien 0:30:22.2: 

We talked about some of the key outcomes that you've had, but what are some other things that you're really proud of? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:30:28.7: 

You see some of them up there already, but when we rolled out the forecasting, this was the middle of last year, FY24. One is we had great adoption. Again, we talked about it before, having a good, really defined use case, commitment from stakeholders, enablement, and then we came back and we continued to work even at the AE level to make sure they understood it, and sales director level. Ultimately you can see a stat up there that those that actually were adopting it, we had 102 per cent forecast accuracy and payment across that, versus ones that weren't as, let's say, religious about it, so that was really good. I think secondly is we just got out of the spreadsheets. I wouldn't say entirely, but for the most part, how we conduct our business is all in Anaplan. It has full visibility, it's all connected. It updates pretty much almost real time in all the data, so we have full clarity on the business. At any time we need to run a new scenario, let's say a board member or a CEO asks us a question around a scenario, what about this, what about that? We could pretty much answer that question in a matter of, could be minutes, could be hours, but the point is without too taxing you can come up with an answer. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:31:44.5: 

I would assume there's an ROI for Anaplan. Have you guys ever calculated that independently? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:31:49.6: 

No, I wouldn't - in terms of hours, you mean? 

 

Dana Therrien 0:31:52.5: 

Yes.  

 

Spencer Hodson 0:31:54.1: 

No, not so much that. I would say just for effectiveness, we're just better. I have a sales ops team that's pretty lean, and that allows us to do a lot more without necessarily hiring a team of analysts or what have you. Even at that, we're just more agile as an enterprise, as a company, and so we can better attune to whatever responses and changes, whether it be exogenous or whether it be internal, that we need to do. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:32:18.1: 

One of the sources of frustrations in sales revenue operations is that they're often called upon to complete tactical tasks. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:32:27.5 

There's still that. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:32:30.8: 

What you described as an environment where you can be more forward looking, more strategic. You're thinking about next year's financial plan, sales plan, six months out, and then you're not waiting to negotiate the new OpEx plan for the coming fiscal year, because you're able to have these insights. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:32:46.4: 

That's exactly right. I would take it a step further, and again I mentioned it earlier, but empowering sales managers and the sales VPs with the same. It's not just sales ops coming up with the strategic and scenario planning, but empowering them so we have a lot of collective thoughts and ideas, so they can actually be a little bit more forward thinking as well. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:33:06.2: 

You're approaching a billion now. What are your plans for the next three to five years? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:33:11.8:  

Keep growing. You can imagine, I think there's eyes to look at the public markets here, probably within the next year, 18 months for sure, so we've got to get let's say our systems pretty much intact, to make sure that we're ready for that kind of scale and that kind of growth. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:33:30.2: 

Yes, and on this honeycomb map that we have, what are your plans for Anaplan for the future? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:33:37.5: 

Yes, you can see it up there. I don't know how many of you already maybe have Anaplan. The Salesforce connector is a big item for us right now. We have to use a middleware. We use Jitterbit, but there's MuleSoft, there's Boomi, things like that. That's going to be really, really impactful for us just from development time. We don't have to configure middleware plus Anaplan and things like that, and just enhances the user experience. That's really, really big. You can see Optimizer T&Q, so we have a pretty well developed territory and account planning. We've been doing it for years, we have the scoring, we have all that. I like to really take advantage of Optimizer and see if we can just drive a little bit more automation as opposed to manual, and just optimize the territories on a more, like I say, automated way and really take advantage of that. That's definitely something we've been talking with your teams about. Then of course the big one which we're here today is, how do we take advantage of Anaplan Intelligence? I'd love to be in a position where we talk about planning, where look, I know we have the capacity, we're going to hire 25 new AEs in the next year. Where do I put them? I'd love to be able to just go into our data models, based on our scoring segmentation create the territories and assign them, and then we can go back to the sales. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:34:55.4: 

Yes, and we're getting there. You've got the platform, you've got the information, lots of it, so it's only a matter of time before we can apply that intelligence. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:35:02.9: 

That's what I'm hoping, Dana. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:35:06.7: 

Well, that's great. We have like, ten minutes left I'll leave for questions, or is there anything else that you'd like to share? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:35:11.6: 

Let me just look at this real quick. I think I've hit most of these. Some of it I think is straightforward, but if you're just venturing into it, again, be very specific on your use case as you get started. Have a complete support from the stakeholders. Have the change management enablement, and it's not a one and done, it's going to be continuous. The beauty about Anaplan is, certainly if you have model builders, you'll always continue to innovate. Just make sure you get that feedback loop, get that feedback from the sales or whoever your audience is, whether it be AEs, sales directors, things of that sort, so you're also building and prioritizing based on the value that they're getting from it. Just stay close to essentially your internal clients on that. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:35:56.7: 

We really didn't talk about segmentation. How are you guys doing it today? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:36:01.6: 

We have built, I don't know if you're familiar with - okay, so enterprise, we have typical sort of revenue. Also because of our digital identity, we also look at a number of what we call employees, because of workforce applications, things like that. There's a standard sort of, call it attributes or heuristics you would see from ZoomInfo or Standard and Poor's, things like that. What we also have, we use predictive insights to then look at our historical performance against, I think it's about 5000 different attributes that we use. We automated that within Anaplan. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:36:39.4:  

So that's really psychographic information, observing how your customers and prospects are behaving, giving you buying signals and things like that. 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:36:46.2: 

That's right, so we scored it, and then using frontier analysis, which we've actually built into Anaplan as well, which allows us then to look at how much whitespace based on our historical. We've done really well in certain verticals, for example, whether it be retail, whether it be financials and so forth. Based on that and based on what they are currently consuming and their size, we can look at how much added whitespace is there, and then prioritize based on whitespace available. Then we can look at segmentation based on not just the heuristics that you see, but also a balance of if it's an existing customer, here's how much whitespace we think we have. Let's make sure to have so many of those, and then how many prospect accounts with whitespace, and then we optimize the territories around that. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:37:27.4: 

Dan Koellhofer in his keynote this morning was talking about our applications and how we design. We do find that Anaplan customers are using our applications on top of what they've done in the past, because maybe we've developed a better way for them to do it. Have you considered applications as part of your strategy? 

 

Spencer Hodson 0:37:45.5: 

We're looking at it. We think, like I said, probably on the optimizers, where I'd really like to lean into because we've built it out pretty well, and then ultimately the Anaplan Intelligence we're obviously very, very excited about.