Aleece Germano 0:00:05.0:

Thanks, Erica. Matt, thank you so much for being here with us today, and flying in from North Carolina, as I understand. Why don't you start by telling us a bit about yourself and your role at Cisco? 

 

Matt Kasold 0:00:16.3:

Sure. Thank you for having me. So I've been at Cisco about 15 years, and I've been working with Anaplan for about seven years. At Cisco I've had various roles within finance, working with sales, working with sales finance, working with sales operations, strategy and planning. We do a ton of forecasting and planning at Cisco, so having a central platform to be able to do that has been a game-changer for us. 

 

Aleece Germano 0:00:45.9:

There's no doubt Cisco's been through a lot of changes over the years. How would you describe the complexity in the go-to-market operations at Cisco? 

 

Matt Kasold 0:00:55.3:

It's very complex. Cisco is a very large company. We sell to, basically, every country, as long as it's not banned, like Russia, but we pretty much sell to every country. We sell to every customer, whether you're military, Department of Defense, whether a university, hotel chain. You can probably see our - there it is right there, if we all look up. So were are in pretty much every retail segment, coffee shops, wherever. So we're very big; a lot of customer types. We also acquire a lot of companies. We acquire about 12 companies a year. That's about every month. That's a lot of acquisitions. Sometimes it's for headcount, sometimes it's patents, customer base. So we're very big in terms of our global footprint. How we go to market, we have over 14,000 sellers, so that's not a small sales team at all, and they cover all the regions, all the segmentation types, whether you're a big customer or small, some of which I mentioned earlier.  

 

Matt Kasold 0:02:00.1:

So we have to tailor our go-to-market strategy, our segmentation to maximize how do we go to market. We don't want to put a bunch of sales reps on a small client, but we also don't want to put not enough on a growing customer. So we spend a good amount of time making sure we have the right coverage, the right customers defined properly, and then we set targets for them, and then the sellers go out and sell. So it's a pretty difficult go-to-market. Every year market dynamics change, with tariffs, with COVID, in terms of how we do business, but we've been getting a lot more into the software space over the last ten years, so that makes up about half of our business, and on top of all these boxes are the software, whether it's led by AI, [?turn-it 0:02:54.9] detectors, anomalies, cyberattacks, and trying to prevent them from occurring. So we've grown a lot in the software space as well. We're not just a hardware company. Probably most of you think of us one. 

 

Aleece Germano 0:03:15.1:

You mentioned acquisitions, and there are a few that come to mind over the past years, of AppDynamics, Splunk, Meraki. How has M&A impacted your go-to-market planning at Cisco? 

 

Matt Kasold 0:03:26.6:

I would say it's made it more challenging. So each of those acquisitions come with their own headcount, come with their own sales planning process. Some of them actually use Anaplan already, so it's made that integration a little bit easier. We're still integrating Splunk, and different acquisitions every year. So having a cloud-based platform like Anaplan, where it's already being used by some of the companies we acquire, definitely helps us to integrate and scale all of the data sources they have, all of their accounting systems, so that we can plan end-to-end globally, not just for core Cisco. 

 

Aleece Germano 0:04:07.6:

Cisco has been on an extended journey with Anaplan, and if we go all the way back to the beginning - and I've got the journey up on the screen for the audience to take a look at - if we were to start at the very beginning, first of all, maybe you could tell us what were you using before Anaplan, and then what did you tackle first? 

 

Matt Kasold 0:04:27.1:

Yes, good question. So, like most of you, probably before Anaplan you were using Excel, paper, pen, Smartsheets, and there was version control issues, emailing back and forth, using Friday's version, Tuesday's version. You're building a formula, you're building the same formula, an audit check, and there's not standardization, there's fat-fingering, there's all kinds of air prone internal audit failures. So all kinds of things can drive what you may have been doing in your company before Anaplan, so that's what we were doing. We really saw the need for a connected planning platform to help us scale our forecasting, our planning, and generate good consistency, standardization. That was a big problem before Anaplan, so definitely a win for us to get onto the Anaplan platform. Then, since then, you can see some of the use cases behind me, so I'm going to hit on a couple. When we started, we started with a handful of models, and we now have hundreds of models, hundreds of gigabytes worth of data in those models. You heard earlier in the keynote talking about AI and the data orchestration, how that they're coming, Hedra developing. 

 

Matt Kasold 0:05:54.2:

So I would say that, if you tried to throw 100 gigabytes at Excel, it will probably crash, your computer catches on fire. Not good, right? So we have really big models. We start with a couple of those use cases, like customer definition, like segmentation, like quota planning, no level goaling. So we have pretty big use cases there, and you can see we're starting to expand, as you mentioned earlier, with some of the acquisitions we've done with ThousandEyes, AppDynamics, Meraki, and Splunk came with additional use cases. So integrating all those together and going forward, there's definitely a lot of opportunity on the Anaplan platform. 

 

Aleece Germano 0:06:40.1:

What kind of team do you have assembled at Cisco to work on all these different models and use cases? 

 

Matt Kasold 0:06:46.5:

We have what some of you might call a center of excellence. So we have a centralized team that helps take in all the requirements, we have a centralized team that does the development, whether it's a data integration, whether it's model-builders, and we're able to get a lot done in a very short period. We have two-week agile sprints, and so every two weeks we're putting out different enhancements. So it's quite a tight timeline, but I would recommend if you don't have a COE set up, I would recommend one. It's a good team. We cover hundreds of Anaplanners from a lot of regions. So I would definitely recommend a set-up where you're able to work closely with the model-builders, with the data team, with your end-users, and it think it's been a good set-up at Cisco. 

 

Aleece Germano 0:07:44.3:

You have a substantial COE in place today, roughly ten people, if I recall. For those who are thinking about starting up a COE with maybe two or three people, what are the skillsets that you would focus on first? 

 

Matt Kasold 0:07:58.4:

A good question. Obviously, some part of the COE needs to be a little bit of technical, whether you've taken your Level 1, Level 2 certifications, understanding how data flows, the data formats. Data is key to any type of forecasting modelling, so I would definitely recommend some experience with data. Some of the model-building is like Excel. Some of the formulas are very close, so if you have any experience with Excel - most of you probably do - then it would be a fairly easy conversion to start learning Anaplan-specific formulas. Obviously, any program management skills, requirements gathering, all of those agile methodologies, also would come in handy if you're a small team looking to start or expand your COE. 

 

Aleece Germano 0:08:47.1:

Which teams do the sponsors come from originally when Cisco decided to start its journey with Anaplan? 

 

Matt Kasold 0:08:54.9:

Good question. So we have a lot of sales use cases, as you can see. So a lot of our original sponsors, so if you're trying to build a business case, maybe you're a prospective customer, it was really driven by the sales team. You can see the ones we have there. So it was really driven by sales, but you can't do any kind of planning, really, without some financial numbers behind it. Whether you're modelling growth of top-line, your P&L, whether you're headcount planning, coverage, all of these items, you need the leadership of sales and finance, maybe operations, so it is key to have that alignment between the different functions. 

 

Aleece Germano 0:09:41.7:

Absolutely. So tell us a bit about how you collaborate with some of the other teams. You mentioned sales operations, sales finance. What does a day-in-the-life look like for you? 

 

Matt Kasold 0:09:55.4:

So a day-in-the-life is pretty busy. We're working with end-users, we're working with IT, we're working with Anaplan, and their roadmaps, which you'll hear about this afternoon. A lot of it is you've got to listen to your customer, you've got to listen to your end-users, see what they want, see how they want to change the product. You're responsible for this application, you're responsible for its success, the data that's in it, how you model, the design of it. So it can be stressful at times. If any of you've built applications, or Excel workbooks, it's very strategic how you put what columns in what order, and what type of data, so I would say it's pretty crazy. It can be a lot of meetings some days. So a day-in-the-life can be - every day is a little bit different, though, so I'd say that's a fun difference, but it can be challenging.  

 

Aleece Germano 0:10:55.7:

You mentioned the importance of data. Which data stores are the most important in your existing deployment, and then, what kinds of integration methods are you currently using to bring that data in and out of Anaplan? 

 

Matt Kasold 0:11:08.3:

So you probably heard a lot about the Anaplan Data Orchestration, ADO, as a new way to build and bring data in. We don't use ADO today. We use more the legacy, like Anaplan Connect, some of the APIs from places like AWS, GCP, Azure. So a lot of our sales data, headcount data, customer data, is coming from those sources, whether it's a Snowflake, an Oracle, SQL Server, any of your normal databases that most of you use. So those feed a lot of our data into Anaplan. Sometimes we refresh data every day, sometimes it's every week, but we send tons and tons of data to Anaplan, and it's able to handle it, which has been great for us.  

 

Aleece Germano 0:11:58.6:

Let's talk some more about goaling, because it's such an important use case at Cisco. Could you define what goaling is, how segments, how many sellers, and the complexity with overlays and other parts of the team that factor into it? 

 

Matt Kasold 0:12:14.7:

Yes, good question. So the quota planning, no level goaling, is a very big model. It's a very complex model. We, like you said, have thousands and thousands of sellers, and we have thousands of customer types, and bringing that all in together, modelling that with hundreds of compensation plans times hundreds of territories, as we sell to almost every country. Whether you break Germany into 20 territories or 100, we have to calculate that quota, how much should that seller sell, based on those types of customers in that territory. I would say it's a complex model. It's much more of a financial model than it is a defining-customers-type model, or a supply-chain-type model. We've definitely had some initial challenges in designing how, what's the best way to display the data to our users, to integrate all the data, but it's working very well now, and we're able to do what would take months in Excel in a matter of seconds. If you want to change the Europe number up ten per cent, it will instantly recalculate all of the Germany, the France, the Spain numbers, and you can make those decisions much faster. I would say it's really helped us and our journey in goaling.  

 

Aleece Germano 0:13:40.2:

How does segmentation and capacity planning fit into goaling? 

 

Matt Kasold 0:13:46.1:

Good question. Segmentation is a key piece. Before you even get to goaling, you've got to define your customers. Whether you're a large service provider, like your T-Mobiles, your Verizons, or whether you're a small coffee shop, you have to have the right coverage, the right segmentation. You need to define that first before you even start setting how much of that seller will sell, how much that territory will be worth, and so that upfront piece is critical, otherwise you're going to have too many sellers on a territory, not enough. You're going to be setting a too big of a quota, the seller's going to get unhappy, 'I worked my butt off, and I'm like at 50 per cent attainment.' So those types of things, it's key to set that quota properly for the account teams, and the goaling application allows us to do that, after we've properly defined our customers, our segmentation, and all of that process is much faster on a platform like Anaplan versus trying to put ten million cells, ten million rows in Excel. It was quite challenging before. 

 

Aleece Germano 0:14:54.7:

What are some of the outcomes and key takeaways that you could share from your journey with Anaplan? 

 

Matt Kasold 0:15:03.1:

I kind of hit on this a little bit, but I would say the quicker you can get your salesforce, whether you're planning for a one sales team, 100 sales teams, the faster they can get out there selling. We've seen definitely a drive in our revenue for the quarter, the fiscal year. So 52 weeks, if they're sitting on their hands for a week or two because they are not selling, because they're trying to figure out am I selling to Florida, to Texas, if they don't know what they're selling, how much they're selling, what they're selling, do I sell maybe our security products, maybe our collaboration or our networking, or maybe I sell everything, they're going to sit around and wait to make sure I'm going to get paid on this deal, that I'm going to cover this deal to the right territory. So they sit and wait. So if you can get them that quota and the customers that they sell to sooner, you're going to drive more revenue for that year, and more likely the seller is going to be more productive, and that's going to be more profitable for your company if they're out there selling, rather than internal discussions, because of you're having issues setting what customers, territories your goal is for, for them. So I would say that's definitely the first takeaway. 

 

Matt Kasold 0:16:20.5:

The profitability comes in with speed, with scale. Like I mentioned earlier with the Europe example, if I want to increase that by 50 million, 100 million, I can do that instantaneously, see what the impacts would be, all the way down to some account manager in Portugal. Anaplan allows us to calculate those very quickly, and it's more profitable for Cisco, because we're able to drive more of that top-line. I would say the third big item is just the alignment between sales, between finance, sales finance, renewals finance, within sales strategy and planning with the account executives, the sales management. So being able to align all of those teams, so that you have a common go-to-market strategy, eliminates a lot of that back and forth that will delay the process. Some of your processes might have to change moving onto a platform, a new technology, so I would recommend getting that alignment internally, and as you go forward, and Anaplan allows us to do that.  

 

Aleece Germano 0:17:36.0:

Looking at the future, I'm curious, what new use cases is Cisco considering, and why? 

 

Matt Kasold 0:17:44.9:

A few use cases we're exploring, so from a slide ago you saw we're heavy in the sales planning space, we have a few in the finance, FP&A space. So I would say probably the first thing is, we're looking to enhance those existing planning models, to make those better. Every year we have different requirements pulling in, as we do acquisitions maybe, like pulling in more mappings, more data. I would say the second is there's some places we haven't even touched at all: supply-chain-use cases, HR, workforce planning. There's a lot we do in other systems, that Anaplan could do for us in a connected [?N10 0:18:28.4] model. I would also say the third would be some of the genAI, some of the AI capabilities. Ask AI to build you a model, ten seconds later it's built. Recommend me a better formula for Anaplan. Some of the use cases around ADO, where we don't use ADO today, around Polaris - you'll hear more about Polaris this afternoon - where we can put much more data into the calc engine. So we haven't even scratched the surface on, for example, Polaris, ADO, the AI capabilities you heard in the keynote. So I would say that's the third use case, is just enabling the Anaplan capabilities that you're putting out each year. So those would be the three where we see ourselves a year, two years, three years from now. 

 

Aleece Germano 0:19:22.2:

Excellent. Matt, thank you so much.