Scott Hirsch 0:00:12.3:
We're ready to get started with our next session in the Revenue Performance Management Go-to-Market Strategy Track, which is Beyond Spreadsheets: Modern Go-to-Market Planning and Forecasting. I'm really excited for this session, it's going to be a nice, cozy, comfortable fireside chat with Justin Edwards, our SVP of revenue and operations here at Anaplan who obviously is also an Anaplan user, since we do Anaplan-on-Anaplan here. I'm going to intro Justin in a second, and invite him up here to have a conversation, but first I just wanted to talk a little bit about Anaplan's go-to-market organizations, so you can have a frame of reference in your own minds for the level of complexity that we're dealing with. Oh but first I forgot, I wanted to show you guys our new sales analyst video.
[Video playing 0:01:02.0]
Scott Hirsch 0:01:17.2:
So anybody who's worked in sales or go-to-market operations is familiar with that scenario, something changes, and then everything has to change. So that's partly what we're going to be talking about in our fireside chat conversation today. First, a little bit about Anaplan's go-to-market. I think everybody in the room is familiar with what we do, we're in the core business of planning analysis, planning platform holistically, and the market context is sort of this shift from enterprise performance management and ERP into decision intelligence platforms. That's where we like to position ourselves as being on the forefront of that vanguard, moving into that new space. In terms of Anaplan's growth, and its basic status as a company, I was not sure that I could share our actual revenue numbers, but then I saw them in the keynote this morning! So they're not on the slide, but to just go ahead and let you know we were taken private in 2022 by Thoma Bravo at about $600 million in revenue, and we finished last year at $1.2 billion. So we've been growing very quickly, and it's due in large part to the strategy that you saw presented this morning around our AI-driven, AI at the core application strategy, as well as the important people that we brought into the organization, such as Justin and others to help us grow, and not only grow but also grow profitably.
Scott Hirsch 0:02:46.6:
So and we have a lot of reach as you'll see on this next slide, we have 36 skews across five lines of business, we have 14,000 use cases in market, we have 250 partners that do implementations, and consulting around Anaplan's services. We have 275 sellers in three geographies and 50 pods and areas globally. Then in terms of sales support we have a huge sales support team as well which is run by a couple of different people, but Joe Horsey who you saw this morning, who also is in charge of some of that, but 25 subject matter experts in the applications team, we have 160 solutions consultants and more than 200 professional services. So it's a very large, complicated go-to-market, that's the point of this slide, and it's a tough challenge. I was talking to Justin about it in our prep for this call and he was like, 'Well without Anaplan it would be a lot harder than it actually is!' So that's some of the stuff that we're going to be diving into in our conversation. Roadmap of the different go-to-market planning applications that we use at Anaplan, so we use our capacity planning application, segmentation and scoring, we use territory and quota, and we also have been a pilot customer of our sales forecasting application that we launched today, and in fact a lot of what made it into the final version of the customer facing sales forecasting application is very similar to or was derived from the work that we did building our own sales forecasting application that we use here at Anaplan.
Scott Hirsch 0:04:21.3:
So I guess without further ado I was just going to invite Justin up, and have a conversation about our go-to-market strategy and planning, so come on up Justin.
Justin Edwards 0:04:33.7:
Thank you.
Scott Hirsch 0:04:40.2:
Okay. Yes, so Justin has been… How long have you been at Anaplan?
Justin Edwards 0:04:49.9:
Just under a year.
Scott Hirsch 0:04:50.7:
Just under a year?
Justin Edwards 0:04:51.2:
Yes.
Scott Hirsch 0:04:51.5:
Okay, cool. So Justin joined up as SVP of go-to-market operations, but he's been doing this for a long time, so he's had an illustrious career doing this at SAP and most recently at Docusign, and has a wealth of experience to bring to the table and the conversation, so welcome, thank you for doing this.
Justin Edwards 0:05:12.4:
I'm flattered to be here!
Scott Hirsch 0:05:13.3:
[Laughs].
Justin Edwards 0:05:14.1:
Thank you all for taking time to hear this conversation, appreciate it.
Scott Hirsch 0:05:18.4:
Yes. So we're going to try really hard not to keep this super scripted, and make it dynamic, we're going to leave plenty of time at the end for questions, because I don't want me to just take up all the time with my questions, I want you to be able to ask yours as well. Some of the opening questions that we were thinking about was I really was curious when I met Justin, somebody who's been doing revenue operations, go-to-market operations for a while, it's changed a lot. So it's not the same as it was ten or 15 years ago, when it was… What we were joking about was it used to be salesforce management, it was really just like the team that ran salesforce and maybe ran CPQ and [unclear company 0:05:55.8] and a couple of other things. How has it changed in your mind, and what's your philosophy to the way that go-to-market operations works now?
Justin Edwards 0:06:02.9:
If I back up and think about the core obligation of my organization and role, it's really driving productivity, and traditionally that's viewed through the lens of driving productivity in the field, for sellers, for post sales, for professional services. I'm also passionate about driving productivity from my team, I think historically when productivity decisions are made, they're made through the lens, and potentially at the expense of other teams. So what I mean by that is they may be driven through productivity enhancements for the field, for the sellers, but at the expense of my team, having to cobble together manually data, let's be honest, normally in Excel, across multiple applications. So I think it's imperative and the way I drive my organization is like I said number one, through that lens of productivity, but it can't be solely through the driving productivity in the field. It needs to be an efficient solution for other personas as well, namely my organization. So that's number one. Number two, my objective and philosophy, like you said, Scott Hirsch, is bringing my team and organization along on a spectrum that I view from champion-to-challenger. On the one side the champion side of the spectrum we have doers, yes ma'am, yes sir, we'll get it done.
Justin Edwards 0:07:49.5:
On the other side of the spectrum are challengers, how do we challenge the status quo of the organization to drive improvements and be really a thought partner to the principle whomever we're supporting, and have a seat at the table to drive again that productivity in the organization. So again two points, productivity, and then bringing that team and that function along on that spectrum, from champion-to-challenger, does that make sense?
Scott Hirsch 0:08:16.0:
Yes, totally. I'm curious, before I go on with more questions, how many go-to-market operations' folks do we have in the room? Revenue operations, go-to-market operations, okay we've got a couple, good, good, good. It's definitely that challenger champion model that is like the hard part of revenue operations, because there's so much work that just has to be done and it has to be done a certain way.
Justin Edwards 0:08:41.0:
Right.
Scott Hirsch 0:08:41.5:
Then you also need to have the time to be able to be the advisor, the trusted advisor for your partners, and the rest of the go-to-market organizations, that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious with that tension between challenger champion, how do you see it evolving, do you think the world… Like are the skills and traits that you're hiring for on your team changing over time?
Justin Edwards 0:09:02.8:
Absolutely, yes, I mean you called it out. When you think about the champion, you could very likely have an organization or a colleague that sits in the salesforce administrative camp, hey let's progress that opportunity. A rep may ask you to progress it on their behalf, which is really common, and that's a historical perspective that the field has had of revenue operations. It's an administrator or an assistant, it's very much on the champion side of that spectrum that I talked about. So as I'm trying to evolve the organization into that challenger, the shape and profile of the people I look for is different. It's no longer an assistant, or salesforce administrator, it is someone that can share a seat at the table, and challenge those principles to think differently about their business. So when you think about bringing the organization and people along on that spectrum, not only does the profile of the candidate change, or the organization, but also the value of the organization to the principle or to the business. The irony is that my team often feels uncomfortable being the challenger, the irony is that the company or the principles want it.
Scott Hirsch 0:10:42.1:
They appreciate it.
Justin Edwards 0:10:42.9:
They want you to challenge them, they want a thought partner, they want to be pushed in directions that they're not comfortable with. So that's the answer to your question, Scott Hirsch, it's yes the profiles changing, because we're trying to change the organization from champion-to-challenger.
Scott Hirsch 0:11:00.8:
Cool, that's great, I was going to segue into what I wanted to ask you about next, which is really if the quality of the work or the type of the work that you feel like operations' professionals need to deliver is changing, and they need to have more of a challenger mindset in certain circumstances, you need the tools to support that type of work. You've worked at places that didn't have Anaplan, so I was just hoping just for a moment you could talk a little bit about how it's different with Anaplan?
Justin Edwards 0:11:28.2:
I have worked for one of the biggest software companies in the world, and I won't say the name, but it was very much the rev ops function was very much as I described, but to give you a little bit more specifics, what it was, was really a consolidation layer in Excel, meaning you would take information from your transactional systems, your ERP, from your CRM, from your HR systems, and others, and merge them manually. Most commonly in Excel, and that was the function of operations. Now that we're also under immense time constraints, so imagine you're not only having to consolidate all of these things from disparate systems, you're also doing it in a time bound environment. So naturally 90% of your time is spent being that consolidation layer, and 10% actually driving insights or outcomes. So that fits with the theme that I'm trying to articulate, if you're able to bring people along on that spectrum, have them spend less time being this consolidation layer, and more time driving insights and challenging the business, the value of the whole organization is lifted.
Justin Edwards 0:12:55.3:
So to get to your point, or your question rather, that's really the unlock for me, and the observations I've had since being at Anaplan, being a heavy user of Anaplan, being customer zero for the organization. Is that we have the privilege of spending more of our time not being that consolidation layer, but rather driving insights and decisions for the business.
Scott Hirsch 0:13:26.2:
Because the tool does a lot of the consolidation work for you?
Justin Edwards 0:13:28.9:
Right, so all of our models have signals and data coming from a variety of source systems, Gainsight, Salesforce, People.ai, Outreach, you name it. It's capable, via integrations, of bringing those things together on a single pane of glass, so you're not having to hunt and peck for those various datapoints, and consolidate them, they're there in front of you. Like I said you can spend more of your time actually analyzing and providing insights to drive faster decisions.
Scott Hirsch 0:14:08.7:
Cool. I'm going to throw you a little bit of a curved ball question, that just occurred to me.
Justin Edwards 0:14:14.3:
Oh great!
Scott Hirsch 0:14:16.0:
So you were talking about like the challenger model and wanting to spend more time as ops professionals being a trusted advisor, can you think of maybe an example or two of situations where you or somebody on your team has had to play that role, and the value you've been able to add?
Justin Edwards 0:14:36.0:
So we haven't talked about this! So bear with me. Very recently, and I’m not sure how much I could say!
Scott Hirsch 0:14:43.9:
Well it's fine, it's fine Justin!
Justin Edwards 0:14:46.4:
We've operated in an environment where I would say we're not as… We don't have as tight of controls as I would like on the account movement process within a territory. So largely that process has been owned by the first line sales leader, and we very recently put in controls that there's more governance in that process. The point of the governance was not to put up barriers, that's never our intent, because as I said my objective is driving productivity. What it was set out to accomplish was ensuring that there's equity in our territories, as we deliver them to the field, because what we've found is that when it's left without that governance layer, territories get stripped for opportunity. So you have a territory with a ton of potential, and others that are far less, and it gives the field far less opportunity to go out and be productive and achieve their number. So that governance that we've implemented allows that fair and equal distribution of the opportunity. The reason I mentioned it in the context of your question is because it has been very uncomfortable for my team to say a word that I am empowering them to say.
Scott Hirsch 0:16:29.9:
Justin Edwards 0:16:30.7:
Which is no.
Scott Hirsch 0:16:31:9:
Yes, no you can't have an exception to this territory assignment.
Justin Edwards 0:16:35.5:
No, right. These are our processes, and not to say that there will never be exceptions, there are.
Scott Hirsch 0:16:42.2:
Right.
Justin Edwards 0:16:42.5:
But we need the very minimum of accountability and compliance, so that we all can be successful and ensure a basic level of opportunity, or a potential in those territories.
Scott Hirsch 0:16:54.7:
I would imagine it's not just about fairness, it's also about being assured that we can actually hit a revenue target.
Justin Edwards 0:16:59.4:
Exactly.
Scott Hirsch 0:16:59.8:
Yes, yes.
Justin Edwards 0:17:00.5:
Right.
Scott Hirsch 0:17:00.7:
Okay, cool. Well thanks for that little thought, that was good.
Justin Edwards 0:17:04.2:
[Laughs].
Scott Hirsch 0:17:05.6:
So when we were preparing for the talk, you talked a lot about how another value that Anaplan provides is sort of the scenario modelling, and the concept of dragging and dropping different types of scenarios, so that you know your optionality, rather than having to go and doing it manually in Excel, and it taking a week and coming back, and not being able to iterate quickly.
Justin Edwards 0:17:27.1:
Right.
Scott Hirsch 0:17:27.2:
Can you talk a little bit more about that.
Justin Edwards 0:17:30.8:
So I mean I'm going to take a pat on the back moment. Me and my team had our territories completed six weeks in advance of the fiscal year, now that doesn't happen through technology alone, there's strategy that needs to be orchestrated, there are decisions that need to be made. There are processes that need to transpire the way you expect. We distributed territories to every one of our AEs on day one of the fiscal year. What does that do? That provides a lift in their productivity. Why do I say that? Part of the reason why we were able to achieve that objective is the ability to model scenarios in real time, so as ops professionals, during the annual planning process, we sit down with a first line sales leader, Scott Hirsch you're the first line sales leader, and we design their territories. So Scott Hirsch let's say you have 1,000 accounts, you have four reps, we're breaking them up into 250 account increments. We…
Scott Hirsch 0:18:39.6:
I want Canada and the east coast.
Justin Edwards 0:18:41.3:
Exactly, right, those are the exceptions that we deal with. So what we do is not only balance those 250 accounts in each territory equitably like I just talked about, we also iterate with that first line manager about, 'Hey, I want a banking account in this territory versus that territory,' it's very iterative.
Scott Hirsch 0:19:01.1:
Nice.
Justin Edwards 0:19:01.7:
So in old world, what you'd have to do is say okay Scott Hirsch give me those changes, I'm going to go off in Excel and model it because what does it have to do, you have to bring the pipeline in, you have to bring the potential in, you have to bring in the quota changes, all of those things follow the account movements. What we have live in our territory application, again that we use, and we're customer zero, is that scenario modelling capability. So I could literally, and as we did this year, sit down with the first line manager, drag and drop accounts, the accounts then automatically sum up in the new territory, follows with the pipeline, follows with the quota. So that we can have that conversation in real time. The time to complete is far improved.
Scott Hirsch 0:19:55.8:
And that's great too because then it's also not a top down process, you're actually collaborating with your business stakeholders.
Justin Edwards 0:20:00.1:
Right, and again think about the outcome that we're driving, it's the six weeks in advance of the fiscal year having everything locked, and on day one of the fiscal being able to communicate the quotas and territories, so that reps can then go out and be productive on day one.
Scott Hirsch 0:20:16.7:
Yes, got it. That makes a lot of sense. So I want to pivot over a little bit and talk a little bit about forecasting now, we were in a session this morning that Kyle and I were leading, and one of the questions we got at the end was somebody from… Who ran deal desk, and this is a little bit of a curved ball too so apologies.
Justin Edwards 0:20:35.7:
Yes!
Scott Hirsch 0:20:37.1:
We're off script.
Justin Edwards 0:20:37.7:
This is a new question!
Scott Hirsch 0:20:38.4:
[Laughs] Even if you don't have a good answer to this scenario, this should be a nice entry point into talking about forecasting, but she was basically saying like, 'There's so many exceptions that I have to deal with in deal desk and it's hard to predict what the exceptions are going to be, because some of them might be depending on…' I’m making this up, '…some of them might be dependent on the rep, some might be dependent on the territory, some might be dependent on the industry, some might be dependent on just market conditions.'
Justin Edwards 0:21:04.1:
Yes.
Scott Hirsch 0:21:04.9:
So how can Anaplan help me do forecasting in that type of scenario, and so if you're not comfortable answering it from a deal desk perspective, you could open it up, open the aperture a little bit and talk about how Anaplan gives you more confidence in doing forecasting?
Justin Edwards 0:21:18.7:
Yes, so maybe not along the forecasting dimension, but what I really like about that territory and quota application that we talked about, is that you set ranges or guardrails, minimums and maximums, to say as I'm engaging with a first line manager if they want this exception and it exceeds the threshold that we've established globally, it throws a flag. So then you can summarize those flags globally, and see who's in or out of bounds. Similar situations exist for the deal desk scenario that was mentioned. With forecasting, back to your question, we are in a very dynamic and complex go-to-market like we talked about, you didn't mention in there, I don't know, how many post salespeople we have.
Scott Hirsch 0:22:20.3:
No.
Justin Edwards 0:22:21.0:
Right, or SDRs.
Scott Hirsch 0:22:22.3:
No.
Justin Edwards 0:22:22.8:
All of those roles and personas contribute to the success of our organization, and right so when you're dealing with different motions, you're dealing with a post sales motion, you're dealing a prospecting motion, you're dealing with a deal execution motion, again Outreach for prospecting, Gainsight for post sales, Salesforce for deal execution, are all different sources of truth, depending on the motion. So the ability to harness all of the richness of those data sources in one pane of glass is literally gamechanger. Again I won't name the companies, but we spent an inordinate amount of time historically, having to gather data from those different sources, bring them together, and then you know what you have, you have a conversation and debate about the accuracy of the data, rather than on the outcome you're trying to drive, or the decision you're making. When there's a single pane of glass the debate is gone, this is what it is, this is the data, it's harmonized in a single application, and then you have the capability of reaching a decision faster with more accuracy.
Scott Hirsch 0:23:40.9:
It reminds me of back in the day, this was many moons ago, I worked at a user experience design firm when that was still a thing, and we used to say, so some of our customers would complain to us, 'Why do we make me look at paper prototypes, why can't you just build the thing and I'll look at that?' One of my partners used to always say, 'Well architects due blueprints so that the client yells at the blueprint rather than yelling at the architect.' It's sort of like a similar situation, which is like if you have all the right data there and everybody can look at the same shared source of truth through a single pane of glass like you were saying, then you can argue about the conclusions you're drawing from the data, rather than about the data.
Justin Edwards 0:24:17.1:
Right, exactly.
Scott Hirsch 0:24:18.7:
Yes, okay. Cool, that's amazing. Oh and I'll tell you too just to the answer I gave her, came much more from a forecasting angle, which isn't surprising since I came through the Syrup acquisition, but over time you should be able… If any machine learning model worth its salt, should be able to do an assessment of the likelihood of exceptions being made on any opportunity, based on the characteristics of that opportunity.
Justin Edwards 0:24:45.0:
Right.
Scott Hirsch 0:24:45.6:
Then over time, like you said, it would give you a confidence interval, I'm fairly certain this deal will close between 500k and 550k or something like that. Then over time that confidence in our board is just shrinking, shrinking and shrink.
Justin Edwards 0:24:58.6:
So we build in, we call them signals. We have signals about whether a prospect has visited the website, we have signals about how often the AE has met with the prospect, we have signals about their health, if they're an install account, right. Those signals allow us to formulate a perspective about the health, or the probability of either that opportunity closing, or that customer retaining. So we're able to bring those signals together as part of our forecasting process, to be a… I don't know if I could… Is this being recorded?
Scott Hirsch 0:25:46.7:
Yes!
Justin Edwards 0:25:47.0:
Okay. I was going to say a BS tester, it's another unbiased perspective about whether the talk track you're getting is based in sound information, so it's an unbiased third party that allows you to validate what you're hearing, that may or may not be BS.
Scott Hirsch 0:26:14.2:
We haven't talked explicitly about this yet, but this might be a good segue into talking about shared sources of truth, not just within sales and go-to-market operations, but also with HR or finance, and Anaplan isn't publicly traded now, but you've worked at publicly traded companies and how important that liaison between revenue operations and finances, do you have any thoughts on that?
Justin Edwards 0:26:36.9:
It's huge across so many dimensions. There's a strong partnership always with finance, HR, and operations, I call it the three legs of the stool, they formulate the foundation of the support organizations from my perspective for any company. That interaction or that three legs of the stool was born through the necessity of collaborating on information. So when you're able to bring these artefacts and data together, it only allows for that partnership to strengthen. A real life use case is what we use for capacity planning, so we bring in a variety of datapoints from finance, HR, and obviously the operations and sales side, to be able to project what we need, when we need it, and in what shape or form. It's super powerful, because otherwise again you're bringing… You have the necessity of being in that collection mechanism, across a variety of different functional organizations. Again I'll say it over and over again, the value then becomes on making the decision and driving insights, rather than spending all your time consolidating disparate information.
Scott Hirsch 0:28:07.3:
Yes, yes. I think I have maybe one more question, and then I really want to open it up and hear some folks from the audience, but looking ahead what do you think, like even one year, two year, five years, with the rise of AI and the toolsets. What do you think is going to distinguish go-to-market teams that reliably, confidently hit their number from those who don't?!
Justin Edwards 0:28:37.5:
Wow. For me it comes back to the… Can you hear me?
Scott Hirsch 0:28:46.0:
I can hear you.
Justin Edwards 0:28:46.5:
Okay, it comes back to the productivity question, I think the use and ability to leverage AI successfully should be measured through a single KPI, and that's productivity. Are we getting more efficient, are we doing more with the same or fewer resources. So that to me as I think about how we're going to leverage AI internally, is the single most important KPI that I’m measuring the effectiveness of our use of AI. Are we doing more with less, or the same amount of human resources. Does that make sense?
Scott Hirsch 0:29:28.0:
Yes, or delivering better results with the same amount.
Justin Edwards 0:29:30.4:
Right.
Scott Hirsch 0:29:30.9:
Yes, yes, totally that makes sense. So and at the beginning I just want to reiterate it, because I think it's important, the way you think about productivity is not just on the operations side, but it's also on the field side.
Justin Edwards 0:29:42.8:
Correct, I think the magic really comes in when those two things are harmonious, it can't be productivity at the expense of another organization. It needs to be productivity driven through automation, like we're talking about with AI, or at a minimum not avoiding manual situations of cobbling together information.
Scott Hirsch 0:30:05.6:
Yes, yes, yes. I definitely want to open it up because I'm sure there's some folks who might have some questions in the audience, I don't want to take up all the time. Anybody? Yes.
Audience 0:30:26.6:
On sales forecasting, I take it you're using a machine learning model to do the sales forecasting, and how are you generating the signals, is that from past historical data that you have, are you bringing in new data, are you bringing in outside external factors in, like market conditions?
Justin Edwards 0:30:45.3:
Right, yes, so it's across a variety of those signals that I tried to articulate, some of those signals are historical transactions, but there's also a pipeline, which would be forward looking, and then signals from activities let's say. Like I talked about website activity, or engagement activity with a prospect or customer, We have the ability to measure to what extent a customer's engaging with us, through our field teams. So we bring together those signals, again historical prospective and traditional signals, to formulate how we are… We call it a statistical forecast, right, statistically and across those signals what is our forecast, independent of what the human perspective is. So it gives us an unbiased perspective.
Scott Hirsch 0:31:45.7:
There are some other signals that I know they're looking at, and I don't know if they're in our AOA incidents yet, but they were going to look at things like, as well, likelihood of the rapport the team from past performance, to over or under-perform, or to over or under-estimate ACV for example. So there were other machine… There were other elements of this they wanted to bring in and see if they could tune the machine to tap that and give a confidence interval like we were talking about on the forecast. Then there's potentially the ability to pull in external signals as well like you were talking about, things like market conditions, which I don't think they've done yet.
Justin Edwards 0:32:22.0:
Not to my knowledge, no.
Scott Hirsch 0:32:23.5:
Yes.
Justin Edwards 0:32:23.5:
The beauty of, and it sounds like I'm selling it, I guess I am but I shouldn't be. The beauty of Anaplan honestly, and it's so powerful, compared to my other experiences, again unnamed. Is the speed at which we can evolve if there's a new signal or a new KPI, I am not exaggerating, I literally can give it to my team, the end of the day, and have it live in the system the next. It's that fast. Whereas where I was working with some of those other situations it would be months, because you'd be in a backlog, and you'd have to wait and wait and then do requirements gathering and building, and by the time it was implemented it would be not applicable anymore! So our agility, our time to react is so much faster and we can bring things in almost instantaneously to your point, as the signals evolve.
Audience 0:33:27.6:
Do you use capacity as signal and your final other capacities?
Scott Hirsch 0:33:32.5:
The question was, do we use capacity as a signal in the profile of the…
Audience 0:33:36.8:
Yes, the profile produced [unclear words - over speaking 0:33:37.5].
Scott Hirsch 0:33:38.8:
The profile of the producers, yes.
Justin Edwards 0:33:40.1:
Not to my knowledge, I mean we don't internally, I don't know if that's a capability that exists in the capacity app.
Scott Hirsch 0:33:48.9:
I don't think so. I was thinking of something else and it left me for a moment, so do we have any other questions, it'll come back, I know how my brain works! Do we have any other questions from the audience?
Justin Edwards 0:34:06.4:
It's a good question though, thank you.
Scott Hirsch 0:34:14.8:
Maybe we could talk about forecast confidence, you and I talked a little bit about that in one of our early prep calls, and I have worked at companies of different sizes, I've been a marketer for a while, I've been very closely aligned to ops and go-to-market teams, and even at this late stage with the toolsets we have available, there is still sales leaders who feel more confident downloading data out of Salesforce or out of some other tool, and doing their own spreadsheet manipulation in order to do the storytelling that they want to tell about forecast confidence. What's your take on that, like do you think those are dinosaurs?
Justin Edwards 0:34:58.8:
[Laughs] I do, personally, but people do what they're comfortable with and what they've been successful at doing.
Scott Hirsch 0:35:09.0:
Of course.
Justin Edwards 0:35:09.6:
I think that world has far evolved, because we have, like we were talking about, the ability to provide an assessment, an independent assessment driven from historical and prospective opportunities, at providing that confidence interval if you will. So like I said we call it our statistical forecast, and the beauty of it is that we're able to challenge the storytelling, because…
Scott Hirsch 0:35:43.8:
Or support it!
Justin Edwards 0:35:45.1:
Or support it, it often comes in the form of challenge.
Scott Hirsch 0:35:47.5:
Yes, yes, yes!
Justin Edwards 0:35:48.7:
We're able to challenge it with real data, that's proven, and our statistical model in terms of forecast accuracy is plus or minus 3 per cent, again $1.3 billion business, and we're within a couple of points on our statistical forecast in terms of accuracy. It is…
Scott Hirsch 0:36:12.5:
CFO loves that.
Justin Edwards 0:36:14.2:
…it's phenomenal. We're able to deliver the accuracy that the business needs.
Scott Hirsch 0:36:24.4:
Any other questions from the group? Yes.
Audience 0:36:29.9:
The accuracy you're talking about, is that at an aggregate level or like is it because you're looking at one of your geographies - what is the importance of the accuracy there?
Justin Edwards 0:36:40.5:
It's aggregate. They obviously vary as you get down the sales hierarchy, for example if we're in Finland there may only be one or two deals in a quarter, at that point they're binary, so our confidence internal becomes a lot less accurate, so the broader the end or the sample sizes, the more accurate our confidence is.
Scott Hirsch 0:37:15.2:
We had Raphael Van de Graaff from Amazon Web Services speak in our earlier session, and he also talked a lot about forecast variance being magnified by your business model as well, so for example at Amazon where they have a lot of usage based customer contracts, how like the forecasts will go from being wildly positive to wildly negative, and vice-versa on a daily basis.
Justin Edwards 0:37:39.7:
Yes.
Scott Hirsch 0:37:40.2:
So without toolsets where you can actually have your finger on that, it gets really, really challenging.
Justin Edwards 0:37:44.9:
Right, for that same reason.
Scott Hirsch 0:37:46.1:
Yes, exactly.
Justin Edwards 0:37:46.8:
Yes.
Scott Hirsch 0:37:48.0:
I do have one last question, in case if anybody has anymore? I'll go ahead and ask it, and then we'll ask the audience again. So this morning in the keynote, and I actually told Justin I was going to ask him this question, so it's not a curved ball.
Justin Edwards 0:38:06.0:
[Laughs].
Scott Hirsch 0:38:06.2:
I really liked the story that Katy Bird told from Nasdaq, about how wildly your business projections can change, in unexpected ways. She told the story of like for example at Nasdaq Anthropic can issue a press release and that will tank the markets, which is great for our trading business, but terrible for our index business. Things like that can happen every single day. Is there an equivalent on the go-to-market planning side, as far as you're concerned, go-to-market operations side that you've seen?
Justin Edwards 0:38:40.2:
I mean there are examples on a much lower scale, that the one that I thought about since we talked about this, is let's talk about the macro, the geopolitical environment right now.
Scott Hirsch 0:38:56.4:
Yes, it's a big one.
Justin Edwards 0:38:57.3:
Right, super scary obviously for everyone that's involved. It also has significant business consequences, for example you may have a territory in the Middle East that was projecting a certain amount of business, on one day, and then the next not, obviously for because of what's going on. So our ability to react to that, we still have a commitment to our ownership team about our results, so how are we going to make up for the gap that that situation created? So we're able to model in scenarios in real time, to be able to project whether that shortfall that its experienced with the geopolitical situation is going to be realized or not.
Scott Hirsch 0:39:52.9:
Right, and then different scenarios for how you possibly could, yes?
Justin Edwards 0:39:56.5:
Exactly, address it. So for example a real example is, are there signals, like we talked about earlier, that suggest that you could bring in an opportunity from Q2, based on the engagement of that particular customer. So in the situation where you have those geopolitical circumstances, you could put more energy and priority into those higher signal accounts, to bring them into the quarter such that you don't have that reliance on those accounts in the Middle East, as an example.
Scott Hirsch 0:40:31.9:
Or if pipeline was growing faster in Asia-Pac than expected, you could up your estimates?
Justin Edwards 0:40:37.8:
Right.
Scott Hirsch 0:40:38.2:
In another geo for example?
Justin Edwards 0:40:39.4:
Yes, sure.
Scott Hirsch 0:40:40.2:
Okay, got it. Cool, that's great, awesome example, very real world that we all can relate to I'm sure, whether our businesses are global or not. I want to open it one last time, are there any other questions from the audience, yes, right here.
Audience 0:40:52.7:
[?It's tactful, but the guidelines beneath us are future road maps? 0:40:52.7].
Scott Hirsch 0:40:57.0:
Future, yes. Yes, so the story there is we're building several incentive compensation management applications.
Audience 0:41:04.4:
Yes. [Unclear words 0:41:04.4].
Scott Hirsch 0:41:06.2:
Okay, perfect, we can talk after the session, but the one we're doing first is the automated crediting application, out later this year. Any other questions?
Justin Edwards 0:41:20.9:
I wanted to thank you…
Scott Hirsch 0:41:22.2:
Thank you.
Justin Edwards 0:41:22.8:
…for having me! This is great, and thank you all for your attention, I appreciate it, if there are any questions obviously I'll stand up here for a little while, if you're shy and don't want to ask in a group, but I'll be here for one-on-one, so thank you.
Scott Hirsch 0:41:36.7:
Thank you Justin, I appreciate that, thank you.