Dana Therrien 0:00:07:1: 

Thank you, everyone, for joining me. My name is Dana Therrien. I've been with Anaplan for six years, but I've spent most of my career leading sales and revenue operations functions for lots of different companies. Prior to joining Anaplan, I worked for SiriusDecisions in Forrester, where I led a research and advisory practice on sales, revenue, and operations, everything that was happening in that market. I advised lots of companies in what was happening. It's been over ten years since I've been doing this, so I've had the opportunity to observe many of the different changes that have happened in this space, the things that are emerging now. Today, I work with Anaplan customers to share with them what we're seeing across the entire, let's call it, the go-to market space. Sometimes you hear about it as revenue performance management, sales performance management, go-to-market, whatever that might be. It dawned on me about a year ago that I've been doing this for 11 or 12 years as a researcher. Prior to that, 20 years as a practitioner, so I decided to start writing a book about it because I had some things that I wanted to clarify in my own mind, see if I could put them down on paper, and then give me the opportunity to share it. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:01:11:9: 

What I noticed when I was writing this book was that there's an arc that most stories go through. Any of the movies that you watch, any of the books that you enjoy, you'll notice that they go through the same arc. Then, if you think about it in terms of your own life, you'll notice that this arc has really translated into some of the things that you've been through. Before I start, I just want to ask you… I'm not going to ask you to stand up or share it with your neighbor or anything like that, but think about an event that you went through, either personally or professionally, and the steps that happened. So where were you before it began? What happened as you went through that process, and what was the outcome? As you're thinking about that, I'd like you to think about a story that made your adrenaline rush. Like, the stakes were high. It was win or lose. You'd really bet everything, and then it was a big enough outcome in the end, where you would want to call somebody at the end and tell them what happened. Just think about that, and I'm going to use that as an opportunity to explain what's happening within revenue performance management, what's happening in go-to-market, what's happened over the last couple of years. What those stakes are, and how Anaplan is really responding to these things. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:02:19:6: 

Really, why we have solutions that are focused on helping companies do this. That arc looks a lot like this. If you think about where you're starting, you generally start in the ordinary world, and then there's a call to action. We can't do things the way that we've done them in the past. We have to do things differently, and if we don't, the consequences of not taking any kind of action are so dire that we have no choice but to move. Now, you might find yourself in a position where you're being drawn into this. It's not voluntary. Somebody else is forcing you to do it, but you have to respond. In a lot of cases, people are just thinking about this on their own, saying, 'We can't continue to do things the way that we've done it. If we do, we're going to lose, and if my company loses, I lose. My colleagues lose. We have to do something to be able to keep up. There have been radical changes in go-to-market. It used to be called sales operations. Now, they're calling it revenue operations. Now, it's called go-to-market functions, go-to-customer functions. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:03:14:9: 

In the last ten years, there's been lots of different changes that have occurred, and they've been radical, and they've forced companies to turn the way that they've done things on their head. What's really driving it is the move to what we're calling revenue operations today. That's happening because companies are being asked to expand beyond what we call sales performance management and really look at things in a different way. What's causing that is a need for alignment from sales, marketing, customer success. Prior to the emergence of these SaaS-based companies, it was operationally efficient and operationally condoned for sales and marketing, and there was no customer success to operate somewhat in isolation of each other. Marketing had their own goals. They were somewhat tied to what sales was doing. Sales had their own goals, and then customer success really took the form of services or professional services, and they were doing things sort of on their own with the advent of SaaS, software as a service. Also, capabilities that were being driven by a lot of the different vendors in this place, including Anaplan. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:04:28:3: 

They were collapsing these silos that existed before, especially with SaaS, because we could measure everything from lead all the way through opportunity. All the way through revenue, and all the way through renewal. The executive boards of many of these different companies wanted to have the ability to understand what the cost of the acquisition was, what the customer lifetime value was, how long it was taking companies to go through that journey. How they could consistently make it more efficient, how they could drive more throughput, how they could make the revenue grow faster, and then also how they could reduce the amount of expense that they were going through at that time. I would imagine many of you have gone through this, or you're going through it now. These companies that are making the changes in the revenue operation space they're doing it in one of two ways. The first one, they're actually committed to driving better alignment between these go-to-customer functions. The second way they're doing it is they're doing it in title only. So if you notice on LinkedIn, or if you notice a lot of your different colleagues, they've changed their titles, from chief sales officer to chief revenue officer. They've changed their titles from sales operations to revenue operations. A year and a half ago, LinkedIn published a story that said that revenue operations was the fastest-growing profession on their platform. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:05:45:9: 

They hadn't seen anything like it, and it's continued to go down that. I suspect, having come from this profession myself, lots of people were just changing their titles in order to keep up, but they weren't changing their operating environment inside the company to try to really drive better alignment between these different functions. So really, the intent of this is to be able to plan in a much more fluid, and execute it in a much more fluid way than they have in the past. Most companies now are planning on an annual basis. I talked to lots of companies out there today. The time span that people are given to complete all the planning exercises, especially in the go-to-customer functions, which means having a marketing plan that's aligned to a sales plan, that's aligned to a customer success plan. That time span given has not grown at all, and it never will. Most companies will start their planning cycles six months before the fiscal year, all the way up until a month before the fiscal year, depending upon how efficient they are. If they're only given three to six months, and the requirement to expand planning across all these functions in a very collaborative way is more demanding, there's only one way to be able to do it. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:07:00:9: 

That's through better efficiencies. Anaplan has responded to that because we're a platform and not a point solution. I'm going to walk you through what it looks like. It gives people the ability to collaborate with all the different executives and different leaders, and all the different people within each of these groups, including the field, facing people during that three-to-six-month period, and also deliver all the plans to the people that need to have them on time. Which means that when salespeople are leading their kick-off, they need to have a compensation plan in their hands. They need to have a territory in their hands. They need to have all their account assignments in their territories already understood. Many companies today, the ones I've worked with in the past, you'll find that oftentimes, it's not happening until the end of the first quarter, sometimes going into the second quarter. The consequences for not getting territories, quotas, compensation plans in the hands of all the people that need to have them at sales kick-off, including marketing and customer success, is that people are very distracted. You lose a quarter's worth of revenue because if you're focusing on bookings, those bookings have a tendency to stall.  

 

Dana Therrien 0:08:02:4: 

They certainly don't move as rapidly as they would if you'd have gotten it done on time. Efficiency is what we're driving throughout this entire process, and we're aligning that. I'm going to show you how our application strategy is really trying to enable that. The big shift between sales performance management and revenue performance management, when you're starting to see people call the chief revenue officer, or a VP of revenue operations, is that it's more broadly focused. It's more collaborative. It's more broadly defined. Instead of just focusing on sales compensation plans, you're thinking about incentives for the entire organization. Oftentimes, customer success people are driven by a different set of metrics that are tied to revenue retention, certain activity-based types, things. Those have to be planned for. When you're dealing with the marketing organization… Just as a practitioner, somebody that did this for a very long period of time, the cycle used to be that the sales organization would get together with sales finance. They would align on what the OpEx plan would be, what the headcount plan would be, what the revenue growth targets would be. They'd spend that three to five months going through that process, and then they were done. When they were done with that, they would hand that plan over to the marketing people and tell them to go do something with it.  

 

Dana Therrien 0:09:15:5: 

Which really puts them at a disadvantage, because now they're trying to figure out what the go-to-market function is going to be for the sales organization. If there's an account-based marketing motion that's in place. They're aligning themselves on a different set of strategic accounts than what sales had done. The goals for field activity for demand planning are not aligned to what the goals were for the sales organization. Then, on the customer success side, their retention goals need to be incorporated into the overall plan. Their upsell their cross-sell motions need to be incorporated into it. If they're not part of that planning process from beginning to end, if they're not aligned on account segmentation and viewing the market in a very similar way, there's going to be disconnects all the way through the entire process. The consequences to that are very, very high. That's living in the ordinary world in the way that I've described it. When you do get it right, 1.5 times faster, customer acquisition. This is from IDC, from Gartner, from SaaStr. Seventeen per cent revenue increase. Fifteen per cent reduction in churn. These are just some of the independent studies that they've done. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:10:21:0: 

Now, not adopting a more efficient, more collaborative planning process is really the ordinary world. I think many people are in a place now where they have to constantly contemplate the cost of not doing it. In some cases, they might just decide, I'm not going to do it, because it's just too high of a risk. No one's going to pay attention. No one's going to notice until you get to the end of the fiscal year, and the entire organization has missed its financial plans for the year. Then we know the pain and the agony that that can cause. Now, having been a sales and revenue operations person for most of my career, it's really difficult to raise this issue up to the chief sales officer, to the chief revenue officer, even to the executive suite. Saying, 'We're struggling to get this done. We're struggling to provide the same level of due diligence in completing these plans cross-functionally as we need to. We need some investment. We need some help. We need some systems in place.' I found that oftentimes, they're somewhat ambivalent to the issue, because the sales, revenue, operations people, all the operations people involved in this, just continue to produce, and they get it done on time. Sometimes there's quality that's lacking, and it's going to cost them a quarter or two until they fix these things. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:11:28:8: 

The challenge for anybody that's in any of these professions is to be able to articulate the problems that you're experiencing, some of the inefficiencies that you're experiencing, some of the missed upside. The upside that you see right here, and then also, to be able to convince them to make the types of investments and the changes that they need to be able to make. The real focus now, sales performance management used to be just on territory and quota management, and then also incentive compensation management. Territory and quota management means taking that sales plan that's given to you at the beginning of the year, converting that into a quota plan, doing all the things that need to happen in order for that to be converted, which means applying over assignment. Sometimes there's exchanges that need to happen for the different product levels. You need to be able to divvy that down all the way to the individual operating areas and regions, and theaters that you have resources deployed, and then all the way down to the individual contributor level. That's what territory and quota management has been in the past. Then, incentive compensation management. It's difficult to say when that process starts, because it's sort of always in play. You're always administering last year's compensation plan. You're observing what's working, you're observing what's not working, and then you're contemplating changes going into the next year. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:12:42:2: 

It's very rare to find a company that's not going to tweak their compensation plans even a little bit. That's generally a 365-day-a-year process that's going through. You're constantly assessing the effectiveness of the compensation plan, deciding what changes need to be made, but then you need to be in a position to execute those changes when you're going into the next fiscal year, and tie them back to territory and quota management. That was sales performance management, territories and quotas, and incentive compensation management. We were also performing functions in addition to that. The territory and quota management, thousands of accounts, individuals in the organization. It's really about account segmentation. Account segmentation is the first step in any kind of strategy and planning process. Typically, the sales operations, finance operations, sales finance was doing this to a certain degree. They were looking for the different segments of accounts, so that they could treat them differently, and they could make different investments based upon those different regions. The typical stratification would be strategic accounts, named accounts, enterprise accounts, SMB accounts. The reason why they do that is because they're trying to figure out the cost of the resources, the costs to serve, and then the amount of investment they want to make in each of those. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:13:56:2: 

Also, as you're designing reward systems, compensation plans, you're designing compensation plans that are going to relate to each of the different titles that are associated with each of these different segments, and then also create a reward system that's going to be cost-effective. Within that, Anaplan has developed a new segmentation application that we just released this year, that helps to automate that process. I'll talk a little bit about that going into it. Most of the time, at the beginning of the planning cycle is really focused on the segmentation piece of it. I have a military background, I think of it as a battlefield, and that's the first step: understanding the battlefield. Then the second step in that is really understanding the resources and how you want to deploy them across it. When you've got all these different segments, let's say you have strategic accounts, named accounts, and SMB accounts. A strategic account manager is generally a lot more expensive than somebody who's working on an SMB account. Small and medium businesses at an entry level point inside of a sales organization. For somebody that's fairly new at the profession, oftentimes, and as they progress up through enterprise and strategic accounts, they get a lot more expensive. You have a tendency to apply a lot more resources to the strategic account side. Let's say, more solutions, consultants, a different level of management, product specialists, whatever it might be. There's a higher ratio of support to those customers than there are to the SMB accounts. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:15:26:8: 

When you understand the segmentation piece of it, then you start to get into the capacity planning of it, understanding which resources, the cost of those resources, how are you going to deploy those resources, and then in what ratios? Once that's done, you have a very deep understanding of how the organization is going to go to market. Oftentimes, it's done by product. Sometimes it's done by industry. There's always a geographical element to it. Understanding that in the short amount of time that you have to evaluate those types of options is what's critical. Then, also doing that across the entire go-to-market function. The revenue performance management piece of it is consulting with marketing, asking what kinds of investments they're going to make, demanding certain investments that are going to be made. This is an Anaplan Connect event. We thought about this a year ago, and how we were going to use this as an opportunity to engage with our customers. Then, the customer success organization, as well, having complete visibility and collaborating and generating input into this process as we're going through it. From there, it's really revenue performance management. The upside to this is high. Seventy-five per cent growth companies will employ revenue operations in 2025, and then they're seeing a thirty per cent increase in lead conversions as a result of having done this. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:16:41:2: 

Where we're going as a company. We've certainly been a platform since its very inception. I joined Anaplan because when I was at Forrester, I noticed that companies were investing in individual point solutions that were addressing pieces of the planning process, but they weren't connected to one another. They were disconnected. There was lots of sharing of information, and it was taking a lot longer to get through a process than what it would have been if they were just on a single platform. Anaplan started as a platform, and today, 15 years after the inception, it feels like we were preparing ourselves for an opportunity when AI was going to deploy across this entire spectrum of information, so that we could draw better insights. It just happened to be a benefit of having a platform that's in place. A lot of the different analysts out there have recognized Anaplan for its platform, approach to sales, performance management, also, supply chain finance, and all the other aspects of the market that we cover. We've been generously rewarded for that and recognized. One of the greatest accolades that we've got was from IDC recently. We're in the top of the quadrant, and they really do celebrate the fact that we're not thinking about these things as disconnected pieces, but they're all a continuous piece connected to one another. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:17:59:2: 

Some of the moniker companies that we're working with, you can see up here. There's lots of Boston companies that we're working with - it's not up on the slide - in the pharmaceutical industry, in the high-tech industry. They've been Anaplan customers since almost the very beginning. They're using us for all these different capabilities that I just mentioned. I'll talk about AWS for a second. AWS, that's Amazon Web Services. Most companies are really using the Amazon platform to drive a lot of their computing power. That's a usage-based business. So when they sign a customer up, they don't really know what the consumption is going to be. They're making predictions on it, using Anaplan. They can look at the qualities of the company that they just signed up, based upon certain firmographic information and psychographic information. Then, put that into a machine learning model that they've created, and say, 'We're going to have a need for this many servers at some point in time. We know that they're going to generate this much revenue. We can expect this much in terms of investment that's going to be required.' They're projecting that out on a weekly basis across the globe, using Anaplan. Another company that you don't see up here, DoorDash. I just had an opportunity to interview them a couple of weeks ago at an event. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:19:18:1: 

Really interesting company, because most companies know DoorDash, but you wouldn't expect them to have a sales force, but they have a sales force that's going out there to all these individual retailers. Any company that might have a need for delivery services and they're signing them up to the platform. Their market is probably one of the most dynamic, expansive markets that I've ever seen in my career. Where every single company that's out there doing business, every little restaurant, every little pizza shop, all the way up to Walmart and Walgreens, is a potential customer. Their list of customers changes so frequently, on a daily basis, that they have to be able to keep track of that. They're using Anaplan to keep track of that information, and then they're incorporating that into their incentive plans, and updating those things on a monthly and quarterly, and annual basis. The sheer magnitude of the information that they're using to keep that updated is incredible. This is really our approach to revenue performance management, sales performance management. The way we've done it in the past. Now, when we start to engage with a company, somebody that's never used Anaplan, somebody that's not used us for territory and quota management, segmentation, capacity planning, oftentimes, we ask them how they're planning. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:20:25:7: 

A seasoned sales revenue operations person will be able to explain exactly how they do it, but it's mostly in muscle memory. It's not something that they've documented. They've never really formalized the process, but we've deployed these systems in companies thousands of times now. Based upon what we see in companies, the experience of people like me, other people who have been doing this for a very long period of time, this is generally the way we go through it. Market sizing means we go outside the market. We incorporate information from outside the enterprise, and we do things like total addressable market, total obtainable market, total serviceable market, and then drive that all the way down until you can get into account segmentation and scoring. The total obtainable market is that list of accounts and prospects that you plan to go after in the next 12 months. Those can be existing customers and prospects, and we've created an application now that gives you the ability to evaluate wallet share. So what's the opportunity that we have to present to them? How much do we have to present to them? How much have they consumed, and what's the value of what's remaining? When you look at that white space, the wallet share, and the amount left to serve, there's not just a total amount left to serve, but there's also a time component to that. You could have $10 million of potential inside of a company, but they're not going to spend $10 million. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:21:49:4: 

There's more firmographic information, psychographic information that they're displaying. There's ways to predict what they're going to do, and then you can bring that down into an exact amount that you want to incorporate into your financial plan. When you've done the wallet share exercise, when you've created that opportunity value by account, all the way down to the smallest accounts. Typically, on the strategic accounts, it's more of a top and bottom conversation. Enterprise, it's a little of a top-down, bottom-up conversation, with some formulaic pieces to it. In the SMB side of it, it's a lot more formulaic, and we're incorporating all three of these into the model. When that's completed in the ways of the past, we would just forget about it, and then we would go off to the territory and quote a piece of it. Now, all that information flows seamlessly into territory and quota, and seamlessly into capacity planning. So segmentation, capacity planning, and then territory and quota is all aligned, and then for the territory and quota exercise, many companies are just doing this on an annual exercise. When they've deployed all their territories and quotas, they leave it up to their field to administer moves, adds, and changes and churn, and things like that in the sales force. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:22:59:7: 

Now, you have the ability to monitor that and to enforce certain standards. For instance, when you have a vacant territory, you want to be able to reconcile what's happened to that vacancy, who's taking it over, what kind of ramped-up quota there might have been, and then how it's going to be covered going forward. So seamlessly going into incentive compensation design. Incentive compensation design is a little bit different than incentive compensation management. I mentioned that incentive compensation really happens 365 days a year. With the design element of it, you're thinking about what motivational factors have happened in the past, what you're thinking about changing, and what the potential cost impact could be to the company. The easiest way to explain that is if you're thinking about changing your payout curves. Instead of paying an accelerator of two X, you're going to go to three X. The question is, what's that going to do to motivation? How many more overachievers could I expect to see? What's that going to do to the overall sales performance of the organization? Will I expect to retire more quota? Will I have higher bookings? Will I have higher revenue? Is it going to be worth the cost that I'm driving into that? So, we're giving you the ability to evaluate those types of decisions in real time, doing what-if scenarios. Then, driving all that into incentive compensation management to ensure that you're paying people out accurately, that you're paying them out in a timely fashion, and that you're not overspending on it. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:24:20:5: 

Then, from the execution side of it, we're getting into sales forecasting, pipeline optimization, and then really just doing the pipeline analysis after that. We've got applications that are working across the entire spectrum. That's sitting on top of a platform that gives you the ability to integrate all these different data sources from the entire organization and then putting things like Agentic AI on top of it. When companies are going through a planning process, especially for sales performance management, they typically ask themselves a number of different questions. Where's the information? How do I get the information? How do I keep the information updated? How do I create a model that's going to be standard enough across the entire enterprise that people are doing some things in a somewhat consistent way? Then, once they've done their piece of it, how do I draw that information back into a centralized resource, and then feed all the downstream processes that need to be fed from that point forward? With Anaplan, we answer those questions at the beginning of it, because we put this platform in place. We are connecting back into all these different data systems that require that information as part of the planning process. Everything from your ERP to your workforce management tool, to your CRM, whatever other information you need to get from inside the enterprise, outside the enterprise, and then leaving it in place. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:25:39:5: 

That's the big difference than what's happened in the past. That's the call to action. In the past, companies were answering all those questions that I just mentioned, but then they were building these complex planning models, generally in Excel, or in some sort of an application that got stood down at the end of the planning cycle. The first month or two for every other planning cycle used to be just constructing the scaffolding of planning. With Anaplan, we've taken the need for that to happen, and we're leaving that scaffolding in place, so that you can do the construction on the planning process that needs to happen. That gives you additional months for planning. It gives you accuracy, and then it also starts to create some standardized processes across the entire enterprise, so that you can act a lot more quickly than what you have in the past. In one of the previous slides, many companies are not just planning on an annual basis any longer. They're doing it on a semiannual basis. They're doing it on a quarterly basis. LinkedIn was one of the logos that was up there. They're resetting their quotas every six months, and they're going to every quarter, because the actions of their salespeople are so tied to the market, they have to have the ability to modify their compensation plans, and mostly their quotas, so that they're keeping track of what's happening in the market.  

 

Dana Therrien 0:26:53:4: 

Otherwise, it would be unfair to their salespeople to tag them to an annual plan. DoorDash was another great example, where they're resetting everything every three months. They're in constant planning motions. They're resetting their territories, their quotas, their account segmentation. They're modifying their compensation plans. They do it first in the form of a SPIFF, and then, if the SPIFF is working, they put it into their compensation plan going forward. the expectation that moving away from the way things are today, to the call to action, is that we're a lot more responsive, we're a lot more agile, and we're able to move with the market much more quickly than we have in the past. One of the most recent events that everyone experienced here was the shift to COVID. There were companies that were using Anaplan and the demand for their services... Nobody knew what was going to happen. The demand for their services and for their products really took off during COVID, because there was a drive to have people do things remotely. There was the compelling event, and it all made it happen. When they were using Anaplan, they had the ability to model what they thought might happen, to project what was going to happen in the future, and at least, they had the ability to make a decision about what they were going to do with the compensation plans and quota. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:28:02:1: 

Some of these companies had just explosive demand for their products and their services, and they put themselves in a position where they made the decision to let the quotas ride. They let their salespeople make millions of dollars during that time because they projected what the revenue was going to be. They understood what the workload was going to be on them, and they wanted to let them experience the upside to that. It was a conscientious decision, and they made that decision in Anaplan. Now, it doesn't have to be something as compelling and as radical as COVID. It could be an acquisition of a company. It could be a shift in the market. We're all going to see changes in interest rates over the next year. Who knows what that's going to look like? It's going to have effects on that. Foreign currency fluctuations, we've seen lots happening in terms of tariffs. All of that has an effect on the business, and if you're not in a position where you can model these types of changes centrally, make these types of decisions, you're sort of at a disadvantage, and you're going to get beaten by the competition. Now, the Anaplan platform gives you the ability to do all that and to collaborate very effectively. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:29:04:2: 

 

This is where we are today in terms of the application development. Application development is really just an accelerator. I don't want to call it an accelerator. It's bringing best practices to the operation, for the organization, and helping our customers leverage learnings that have already been learned from other companies. Bringing those into place, reducing the implementation time from somewhat as long as six months, down to six weeks. So for the segmentation application, that gives you the ability to go out there and do the market analysis, we have a formulaic, structured way to assess the different segments inside of the organization. You can move accounts up and down between these different segments in a very quick way, using different criteria that you choose. You can collaborate with sales and marketing, and customer success across the entire spectrum, so that you're all aligned on doing things the exact same way. Then, the other benefit to planning is that the revenue performance plan for the organization is so tied to demand planning for the marketing group, opportunity management, and conversion, and then also churn. When you're changing assumptions in that, you can do it very, very quickly and still meet your planning timelines. Territory and quota management, and territory and quota design, that's an application that's already completed. It's out there. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:30:19:1: 

We're bringing our release to that out September 16th, and I'll talk about what some of the advanced features are going to be in there. Sales forecasting, pipeline optimization, and sales productivity analysis, and insights. These are all under development right now. Then, incentive compensation management, we have hundreds of customers using incentive compensation management today, in the way that we've done it in the past, but we've turned that into an application, and that's going to be released in the next 18 months. The intent is to make it easier for you to deploy these types of solutions in sales, to reduce the time to value, and to make you much more effective in what you're doing. Now, the value of all of our solutions is that they connect across the entire enterprise. Probably one of the biggest opportunities between sales and finance to collaborate is on the overall sales planning process. If you happen to be a hardware or software manufacturer, if there happen to be services involved in what you're selling, it gives you the ability to integrate seamlessly into the supply chain. To be able to predict revenue forecasts all the way out to the point where you can understand the dependencies on every little piece part that needs to be brought into the supply chain, and how quickly you'll be able to convert that. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:31:31:6: 

We've got lots of customers that are out there. JLR was one of them that was there, where they've integrated their supply chain with their sales organization, with marketing, and everything is done in real time, constantly. This is a journey. Companies don't typically start there. What they do for any of the customers that are out there now, you know that you just continue to build upon things one after the other. The opportunity for anyone in this field today, going from the ordinary world to what's going to happen in the future, is really the combination of growth and efficiency. The new sales reality is that we have to be a lot more responsive than we have been in the past. There's been an explosion in the amount of data that we have available to us. Most companies are undermining the information that they have within their own four walls. We also have the ability to start bringing information in from the outside. To be a lot more customer-centric, and then also to reinvent some of the mandates, where companies are being asked to respond to certain things. The focus that we have within the sales performance and revenue performance management practice at Anaplan is revenue leaders, strategy, and operations, and then, really, some of the frontline teams. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:32:49:6: 

With sales and revenue operations, typically, it's not just a centralized organization. You've got operations, people that are sitting out in the field and in individual theaters. AWS is a really good example of a company that's using a federated model to service the headquarters needs of the organization. Also, they give their field operators the ability to develop and modify the models in Anaplan to meet their individual needs. They also give them the ability to develop ones that are more suited to their markets. If they notice that something's working somewhere, they'll take it from that individual field location, and they'll bring it up to the centralized organization. It's a really exciting time to be part of this platform and to be deploying it across the field. One thing that I've noticed is that those companies that I mentioned at the beginning, where you've got people who have changed their names, just in title only, sales, operations, now revenue operations. CSOs, chief revenue officers, they're using Anaplan to help fulfill the vision of alignment across the enterprise. So they're saying we've been given this mandate to drive better alignment between these go-to customer functions. Anaplan is a platform that will give us the ability to do that. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:33:59:3: 

They're starting off with collaboration between marketing and sales, and then sales and customer success, and they're starting to plan together. They're using it as a catalyst. Those companies that are doing it are growing faster. They're a lot more efficient in the use of their resources, and also, they're able to retain top talent. Retention in the sales organization is incredibly important. Let's say that desired retention, the way that Anaplan is enabling that, is that we're helping companies do a much better job at assessing the size of the market. Segmenting those accounts, driving that account segmentation to the right person, deployed against the right set of accounts, in the right title, which is really capacity planning, and then the territory and quota that's based upon an accurate prediction. Giving the same level of due diligence as given to the CRO of the company, so that your salespeople feel as though they have a fair shot at making the number that they've been given. When you start to lose people, regrettable attrition, oftentimes, those top performers are producing more than one person's worth of results. So if you lose a top performer in your organization, you're really losing two and three people at some point. You're better off just to try to retain them through better methods and processes. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:35:10:4: 

With the applications that we've developed, here are some examples of how quickly people are able to deploy these types of things. Adam Thier spoke earlier today. He talked about Arrow Electronics and a number of other different companies, where they were able to deploy in a matter of ten weeks. So territory and quota management, account segmentation, capacity planning, you start to work with Anaplan in a matter of weeks, you have these solutions up and running. Now, the way that we used to do these things was there would be a conversation with you, your operations people, whoever else was involved, ask them what their requirements were. Oftentimes, they weren't able to articulate it because they'd never really documented it in the past. We're asking them to do this all while they're trying to execute on the current fiscal year, trying to close things out, and trying to ramp themselves up for the next year. This takes that requirements gathering process down to a matter of days, instead of a matter of weeks, and we're able to really deploy things much more quickly. Now, I'm going to talk about some things that we're working on in addition to these applications, so that you'll be abreast of what's happening. What's next, really, is territory and quota optimizers adding to the territory and quota version two. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:36:21:2: 

We've had territory and quota available for the last two years, but the optimizer is going to give the ability to suggest quotas and territories, and also capacity, based upon the machine learning and the algorithms within Anaplan. Either the ones that we create for you, or the ones that you bring forward. No more just guessing where you want to deploy the next best resource, and what the quota should be. We'll start to offer more prescriptive advice, more predictive advice, and tell you where we think you should go. The sales analyst, the co-planner, Adam, talked about that on the mainstage today. That's going to be available on September 16th. So just in less than a week right now, where you can start to have a dialog about what's happening in the organization, what the plan should be, and start to get some suggestions on where you think you need to go. The next thing, the Anaplan CoModeler, we're really excited about this. I think this is a game-changer for everybody, especially for Anaplan. Adam did a demo on this today, where you're no longer going to have to be completely reliant just upon a model builder, or the model builders are going to be made a lot more efficient when they have a co-modeler, that's going to suggest to them, and get them to a certain level of model creation and documentation. It's going to take a fraction of the time, as it did in the past. 

 

Dana Therrien 0:37:40:0: 

Now, just imagine that you've been asked to design a new sales territory, or a new segmentation model that you want to do on your own, or even a new compensation plan, and you're able to consult with a model builder that's virtual. It will start to get you at least off the ground, and get it done in a matter of hours, instead of a matter of weeks. Another one, October 15th, we're going to have a built-in connector that's going to go directly to Salesforce. In the past, we would have to create all those connections somewhat manually into the Anaplan data orchestrator. Now, it's going to be right out of the box. We're really excited about that. Most of our companies that are using Anaplan today are using that. The applications today, I mentioned,  segmentation and scoring is available. Capacity planning is available. Version two of territory and quota planning is going to be released. It was released this year, and sales forecasting is currently under development. So no more choosing your journey if you don't want to. With Anaplan, we give you a lot more prescriptive advice. We make it easier for you to deploy these things, and we give you the ability to get a lot quicker return on your investment and time to value. With that, let me just see if there are any questions or experiences people might like to share.