Dan Koellhofer 0:00:10.1: 

My name is Dan Koellhofer. I head up our applications group, specifically around go-to-market applications. Predominantly covers sales and marketing use cases. Think of territory and quota, capacity planning, sales planning, sales forecasting, incentive compensation. It's my expertise. I've been doing this in this space for about 20 years. I worked at a company called CallidusCloud for 13 years which was acquired by SAP. Then I also worked at the largest background screening company and an industrial AI company, so that can also give some perspective on all the talk going on around gen AI and how that fits into our product offering. Specifically, what we're going to be talking about today is revenue performance management. That's a new, emerging space, and it's different from something called sales performance management that's been out for 15, 17 years, defined by all the analysts. What we'll be covering today, what I want you to leave with, is really a good, strong understanding of what we mean by revenue performance management, how it can help revenue operations function optimally. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:01:17.9: 

We want to talk about how that's evolved from where sales performance management was, and how this is helping companies think of a bigger picture towards profitable growth, and then we also want to talk a little bit about the applications we've been developing over the last 6-to-12 months and how this can fit into you and your Anaplan ecosystems. If we could just do a quick show of hands here - I really would like participation on this - do me a favor. Raise your hand if you're currently using Anaplan today? Versed in it. Fantastic. Any folks looking at Anaplan for the first time, ready to dip their toes in? New folks. All right, great. We'll make sure we give you some perspective here too. Any partners as well? Awesome. Okay, great. So we have representation across the board. I'll try to do my best to give you callouts and help you understand how this can be impactful for your different types of orgs, but really we're seeing a lot of buzz right now as we talk to our customers and prospects regarding revenue performance management. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:02:23.4: 

Part of this comes back to why this is important, right? Everyone always starts with the chaos of the market slide, when you look at all the dynamics going on. There's huge technology shifts taking place with, 'How do we leverage gen AI?' I like that example of the gym equipment that was in the morning session. People like to have this shiny new toy that they can point to, but are they getting use from it? There's a lot of pressure to think, 'How can we leverage gen AI appropriately?' There's all market factors, dynamics around tariffs, world changes, that companies need to be thinking about, and then new products and services, so your organizations are transforming the way that you sell, going from just devices to incorporating consumable services. As part of that, companies are needing to look from focus on a booking event to really thinking about, 'How do we think of this as a long-time customer and how do we think of nurturing this customer, and what kind of revenue can we expect from them over time?' 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:03:28.7: 

So when we look at how companies are doing planning today there's kind of a spectrum. Everybody goes through these ceremonies of annual events, and I think the reason why a lot of these events happen on an annual cadence is because there's much hardship associated with this. I think about the typical MBO program. I think of when companies are planning which accounts they want to go after this year, when they think of where they're going to be bringing resources into their organization and the type of bets they're going to be making on people, and where they're pushing chips in. There's a lot of effort with that, and the reason there's a lot of effort is people are starting with a blank Excel model in most cases, Excel screen. They're building this out from scratch. They're not using muscle memory where they're doing this every week so they know the best way to do this. They're trying to refer back. 'Well, what did we do last July when we went through this cadence last year? What worked? What didn't work?' It's kind of a crapshoot. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:04:22.1: 

What companies inevitably do is, you have the mid-year adjustment. You roll out your comp plans, you roll out your go-to-market strategy. You realize, 'Hey, some of these things didn't work, but it's okay. We're going to have a mid-year adjustment in two months. Let's get versed on that, and we're an agile company. We can respond two times a year.' So the analogy I like to say is, every one of you has a CTO in your company. The CTO at some point probably said, 'Hey, we're going to be an agile company. We're going to do agile scrum.' If that CTO came out and said, 'We're going to run 27-week sprints, or 52-week sprints,' they would get laughed out of their job. The purpose of being agile is doing a one or two-week sprint. I think one of the things that we're seeing with companies, especially those that adopt Anaplan applications, is there's best practices built into these so that you truly can look at this on a continuous repetitive basis, and plan and adapt to the market conditions as they evolve. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:05:20.9: 

Gartner says 70 per cent of companies are starting to do this more frequently, but they need tooling to do that. So that's kind of the gist here of the market we live in. When we talk about revenue performance management, I like to put this slide up because it helps people to understand the mindset that takes place between sales performance and revenue performance management. Sales performance management is a space that, like I said, has been established for about 15 years now by Gartner back in 2009/2010. It really focused around helping companies get the most out of their sales organization. What we've heard though, as I mentioned, is there's this evolving trend towards looking more at lifetime value of customers. When you're talking about planning for your organization it's not just bringing sales individuals on and sales overlays, but how do you account for your partner organization working hand-in-hand as part of your go-to-market? How do you think of services or customer success as part of your true go-to-market offering that's nurturing and fostering that customer over the lifetime of that account? 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:06:26.2: 

It's about not just bookings but revenue, and driving these changes. What we see over time, and what analysts state, 1.5x faster customer acquisition adopting these types of approaches. We see 17 per cent revenue increase as you look at rolling out rev ops as you look at new delivery models towards consumption-based as opposed to massive land deals. So there's these new trends that are coming out that without proper rev tools it's hard for you to go say, 'We're going to roll out a consumption-based model,' because we don't know what our upside is. What are we leaving on the table instead of that big deal up front? So another example of this is, if we look at the SPM space it's predominantly made up of incentive compensation and territory and quota. Put some reports on top of that for executive dashboard, operational reports, and that's really the SPM space. Again, I fully believe that there is huge opportunity to expand that, and first principles, if you really want to have an optimal program you've got to look at the data that's going into those systems. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:07:39.8: 

So if we look at territory and quota management there's two big datasets that you use for territory and quota. So for a given organization let's say that we have 1 million accounts that we're pushing in and we're going to assign out to our reps, and then we have 5000 sellers or go-to-market participants that we're going to assign territories and quotas to, internal and partners. Well, if you think about that, how often are you optimizing that? Again, it's that once-a-year approach. 'How are we going to slice our customers up?' These are going to be partner. These are going to be channel. These are going to be direct. These are going to be digital. These are going to be high-touch human-based. How often are you doing this? This is where we looked at this and said, 'Hey, we think we can address this.' We've had customers who have come to Anaplan before with their platform and have built bespoke models to address these particular areas for optimization, and we said, 'Let's add this into our offering.' So we've built out applications to help customers with each of these areas. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:08:41.5: 

So if we look at account segmentation, for instance, that 1 million accounts we just talked about, this is from Deloitte where they say 12 per cent of your accounts make up 65 per cent of your revenue. We've seen some customers, 10 per cent is 80 per cent of your revenue. Then you have that middle band that's making up about 20, 25 per cent, and then the lower-end commercial that's bringing up the remainder. Really, when you think about how you're doing your account segmentation, it's about, 'What are those accounts that are right on the end, or on the edge?' Are you getting them in the right classification? If you do there's huge rewards for that. You're going to be using the right level of service because you're going to have the right type of go-to-market associated with them, and you're going to be able to capture the right revenue from that account. Getting those right is hugely important to customers. These are tens of millions of dollars of impact to most organizations. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:09:38.8: 

In a similar vein, if we look at outside of the accounts, if we go over to the resources we're using, this is your largest expense within your organization. How do we assign our resources to those accounts? Getting that right really does matter for you. There's huge costs associated with moving them from a commercial model or a high-enterprise or diamond-type account. So because of this, just in May we've just released two new applications. This is our segmentation and scoring application. This allows you to take in those 1 million accounts. It can work with external datasets, so if you're pulling in LexisNexis data, if you're pulling in 6sense data, other AI algorithms, it can bring all this data into Anaplan's model and allow you to use this and come up with appropriate scores for each of those accounts, and segment them out to the right type of go-to-market motion for you. The important thing is, this can change. It's not a once-a-year use application. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:10:43.0: 

In a similar vein, to address that go-to-market capacity - your headcount - we've come up with go-to-market capacity planning. This is where you can correctly and optimally continue to look at your headcount resources and figure out how they should be deployed across your organization. This isn't just about where you're going to bring new headcount, but how can you allocate your resources that you have as things are changing. We see right now it's not like an all growth at all costs in this market. We see a lot of press releases stating the opposite, so it's where you're keeping those resources inside your company for optimal return. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:11:28.9: 

We're getting to the product slides in just a sec. When we talk about rev ops, again there's some standard go-to-market motions that we're seeing that come from high-functioning rev ops that are adopting our PM. Aligning cross-functional teams. Capacity planning to know what's the right ratio, our golden ratio of AE to sales engineer to service consultant to evangelist. Enhancing data-driven decision-making. Using data to say, 'Where should our next hires be and in what roles? What type of account should be serviced by this territory?' Streamlining this process, it's built into models. You don't go and generate a new Excel model when a new tariff is announced. Then having that revenue growth capability, time-series forecasting, looking at these accounts over time and seeing how that can factor into your true upside, is really important. So there's a lot of good things. This is top-of-mind. Seventy-five per cent of companies are trying to address this right now, and there are huge returns that can come from this. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:12:28.1: 

We like to think we're really strong in this, and we think this because that's what other people are telling us. These are trusted third parties that are saying, 'Anaplan has a really rich offering regarding RPM.' Some of these have focused on SPM, but we're starting to see markets like ISG. They actually have a named revenue performance management space. You're starting to see these analysts pick up that. Again, because of this we feel really confident in what we've been able to deliver with you here, that we have the leading solution when it comes to RPM. Many of the customers we're working with are the biggest, most complex customers in their verticals. These solutions work across verticals, which is really important for you to know. You're not going to be painted into a corner because we have just a strong solution for telco or life sciences or tech. When we're talking about these deployments, they can actually happen pretty quickly. If we look at our territory and quota application, the last seven implementations that we've done have all been under 18 weeks. The majority are around 12 weeks. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:13:32.8: 

Generally, what we're seeing is that customers are asking for additional use cases, and that's adding a week or two to the mix. In terms of confidence to deliver, being able to give your organization something you can work with, we can do this in really fast order. So, the benefit that's coming from this. You're able to grow a heck of a lot faster. You're bringing in the right resources at the right time, assigning them to the right accounts. You're doing this efficiently with the right headcount, and then we're helping you retain key talent from a territory and quota perspective, giving people realistic quotas that they can confidently hit with the tooling that they've been given.  

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:14:20.5: 

All right. What I want to talk about here, we're going to start getting into platform, where we're going. I want to just set the bar with some of the components that we've heard about this morning. So the majority of the room here is an Anaplan customer. You have access to our platform and you've built, in most cases, probably bespoke applications, bespoke use cases and models on top of that platform. That is not going away. You have full access to that. You can do any use case you want with that. In the last two years we've developed applications for the most common use cases for our customers in four areas. Sales, workforce, finance and supply chain. Then what we've also been doing is, 'How do we bed AI into this?' With these three components, this has allowed you to not only have access to those different use cases for your business, but you can also purchase applications from us that can do things out of the box. When we look at revenue performance management it's segmented into three key areas around planning, incentives, and execution. So we talked about SPM earlier. That's really this incentive piece, and then territory and quota right here in the middle. RPM's broader. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:15:37.2: 

We nail the go-to-market planning with our account segmentation, go-to-market capacity planning, and T&Q planning apps. Then we have the incentive piece which helps you roll out comp plans, focus reps' behaviors and results in alignment with corporate objectives, but many people don't know about the execution piece. This is where we actually have about 95 customers that have implemented us for sales forecasting. This is really cool, because your reps are using us to make their commits and work it all the way up to the CFO in terms of how you're tracking to the quarterly goals, to the annual goals. So this is really important, that we're able to do this out of the box for our customers with our applications. It's not just these applications, but what Ivo mentioned earlier around partner applications and the bespoke use cases, this is where you start to see how these core applications can integrate to things like deal desk and pricing. Immediately following this session, you're going to see… My friends from Ciena are going to come up and want to talk a little bit about how they're using Anaplan. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:16:46.5: 

They've implemented it for several other use cases that you see here ancillary to this core set of RPM capabilities. How can I understand what revenue is recognizable from a deal and when? That's really important as you're trying to meet your goals quarter-over-quarter. All of this is tying into what a connected, agile enterprise looks like for your business. So from here, let's start talking about what's next. This is our mandatory slide around forward-looking statements, but things that are shipping literally in the next two weeks with our territory and quota application is the ability to run something called Optimizer. So Optimizer is one of our ML capabilities that can take a wide range, thousands of accounts. It can use any set of factors about those accounts and use them to optimize assignment of them across a set of territories. You can do things as simple as say, 'Hey, I'm going to peanut butter spread my revenue potential for my reps,' or you could even start to factor in, 'What languages can reps speak? I want to look at the home country for each of these apps and make sure the rep I'm assigning to them is appropriate,' so when you look at some of the areas in the EU, making sure you're doing those assignments correctly. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:18:07.1: 

This is really cool. This saves literally hundreds of hours from your sales team trying to go through this methodically in a manual process, and this is coming this summer. As part of that summer release we're also officially unveiling CoPlanner, being able to include that for our territory and quota customers. The cool thing about this - you heard Ivo and Lee talk about this earlier - this is really the front user experience for all of Anaplan Intelligence. This will initially allow you to just interact with the data and find out interesting queries and inferences from the models, but over time as those agents come out there'll be more and more inferences and recommendations exposed to the different personas in territory and quota and our other applications. Then in the fall we have our new go-to-market planning app specifically for Salesforce. What this does is, it allows for this really rich bidirectional streaming integration between Anaplan and Salesforce. This is really important as we roll out a sales forecasting application in order for sales forecasting and Salesforce to be perfectly in sync at all times. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:19:18.9: 

Think of the last week of the quarter. You can't have those systems be out of sync, so incredibly important for us as we look at continuing to evolve our product offering around sales forecasting. The other thing to point out about this, we're also including native Lightning components. So, quick show of hands. How many of you are using Salesforce as your sales cloud experience? Okay, so about half. We generally see about 80 per cent of our customers use Salesforce, so it's really important for us to have a really tight integration. So it's not just running as a tab inside of Salesforce, but it's like native component. Think of the opportunity pane. I could drop a compensation what-if estimator in there, or on the Salesforce home screen I could have access to Anaplan workflows, and if I have open items that I need to work on they could be surfaced in Salesforce where your Salesforce lives. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:20:10.4: 

Then, from an application perspective, we're going to be building out some additional applications as part of our RPM offering. So we have hundreds of customers using us for ICM today. We're productizing this so that we can do a better job, a more quick job of giving you access to compensation management for your org. Then I mentioned the sales forecasting piece, being able to help your team set their commits, set their forecast and be able to roll that up through the organization and tie into the other Anaplan applications. Then Ivo presented this earlier. I want to take a different tack and focus more on the functional use case around AI and how I see AI being able to be added to my SPM and RPM applications here. So we talked about CoPlanner being the front-end experience, and that's being rolled out right now. Later this year we're also going to be adding some of these that are the first pass at our new agents. The first one - you got a chance to see a demo of it - was the model builder. I hope you guys thought that was pretty cool. That's helping your teams roll out custom Anaplan models super-quick. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:21:31.4: 

It will also do extensions to the applications, so if you want to work with territory and quota and have it make some changes you can have it interact with the Anaplan application. What I really want to talk about though are these analysts that sit on top of the model builder. So these are going to be functional and vertical-specific analysts that will be able to help you from more of an industry knowledge and functional knowledge around looking at a model and understanding pros and cons from it. So imagine you can look at all these numbers and the model could say, 'Hey, here's some interesting things I noticed between scenario A and scenario B that we just generated. Let me break it down for you on how these scenarios could impact your business differently.' This is going to be some really cool stuff. Each of the application groups is looking at, for our applications, what are the different jobs to be done in how we could surface recommendations and inferences, and those will all be delivered via these different analysts here. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:22:27.2: 

Phase four gets more into that detector piece that Lee spoke about, that anomaly detection, that proactive alerting, noticing certain trends. 'Hey, you're five weeks out from quarter-end. We see that your commit is at a ratio that might need addressed. Here's some recommendations you could do through compensation plan promotions, through enablement work, to get that organization back on track, and here's the model that can prove how you could go about rolling that out.' Phase five gets more into that studio that allows you to bring your knowledge, competitive intel, strategy documents, etc., and create your own agents that can surface that content through your organization at large. If those of you in the room head up a COE, this would allow you to go to your business partners and say, 'Hey, there's some really cool ways you could take your industry knowledge, embed it in here,' so it's not just a model they're looking at but they're really working with this new AI agent.