Anaplan helps Chief Revenue Officers make growth happen

Since the beginning of the year, businesses have been dealing with a laundry list of disruption and change – from surging inflation and price hikes to broken supply chains and political unrest. This volatility has put leaders on edge and driven a steady decline in CFO and CEO optimism in recent quarters. Yet even in times of uncertainty, c-suite expectations and priorities remain largely the same: profitable growth.

But predictable and profitable growth doesn’t just happen on its own, especially in a market where traditional revenue streams are no longer reliable. It’s the result of an agile and effective go-to-market strategy, where Chief Revenue Officers (CROs) can plan, manage performance, and then make course corrections at the speed of the market and the business. That means identifying accounts with the greatest revenue potential, ensuring complete coverage to build healthy pipeline, and motivating your sellers with the right quotas and incentives to make growth happen.

Unfortunately, data shows that CROs fail when they fail to plan. A recent study from the Sales Management Association revealed that only 36% of companies believe they are good at planning, and only 40% of sales leaders believe their sales plans are effective at driving growth.

These insights point to a larger problem amongst many CROs who still rely on traditional sales planning techniques – where targets and territories are set based on gut feelings or historical data alone – and disparate tools and systems, leaving their sales plans static, siloed, and often ineffective.

That’s why Anaplan is focused on helping our customers re-imagine their sales planning processes to be more predictive, strategic, and collaborative, which should, in turn, unlock new growth opportunities for their organizations. Our goal is to arm Chief Revenue Officers with more data and stronger insights than ever before, so they can fill their pipeline with realistic, winnable opportunities and ensure their revenue strategy is connected to their sales execution.

Seamless integrations drive strategic execution

One of the ways we help CROs create, adjust, and execute more agile go-to-market strategies is through our relationship with Salesforce.

Building an effective plan starts with data, but many organizations struggle with unconsumable, unreliable, or inconsistent data across a variety of systems and tools. With Anaplan’s connector for MuleSoft, as well as our seamless integration with the Salesforce CRM suite, sales and revenue leaders can gain deeper insights into what’s working – and what’s not – in their go-to-market strategy. Our platform acts as an automated and centralized hub for critical sales data, so sales teams can spend less time debating, cleaning, and manually inputting data, and more time aligning on a plan to achieve their goals.

Plus, with Anaplan’s native AI/ML capabilities, CROs can feed historical data from their Salesforce CRM into their Anaplan models, then leverage our AI and ML algorithms to analyze and score accounts based on their propensity to buy today. With stronger insights in hand, CROs can optimize their pipeline by prioritizing customers with the greatest revenue potential. This insight can also be used to build fair territories, create more accurate sales forecasts, and set attainable, yet motivating quotas for sales teams – which can be fed back into Salesforce CRM for effective seller execution.

In addition to data integrations with MuleSoft and Tableau, users can leverage Slack in their Anaplan workspaces to collaborate with colleagues across sales, marketing, and finance, sharing pages, and notifying team members of changes or actions they need to take in real-time through their sales planning processes.

And our partnership continues to grow. Later this year we’ll kick off our Early Access (EA) program for the Anaplan Solution Kit for Salesforce CRM – a set of pre-configured templates and integrations for intelligence-driven territory and quota planning – and introduce our native CloudWorks connector for Salesforce CRM. These new capabilities will speed up sales planning, decision making, and execution, helping CROs accelerate business outcomes.

Together with Salesforce, we provide customers with a one-stop-shop for sales planning and sales execution – arming CROs with the tools and insights they need to uncover new market opportunities, optimize sales resources, and motivate sellers to make growth happen.

Data-driven alignment helps Lumen Technologies reach new heights

A great example of the value this partnership provides to sales leaders comes from our customer Lumen Technologies. For the global telecommunications giant, a deluge of sales data had become a barrier to growth within sales and marketing. According to Mellanie Webb, Director of Sales Operations for Lumen, inconsistent, unreliable data was driving misaligned strategies, “We were delivering random acts of data.”

Mellanie and her team quickly realized they needed to harness the power of data to establish stronger alignment across the company’s revenue functions. Today, Lumen leverages Anaplan’s Predictive Insights capabilities to target and score accounts for a more effective sales plan. And, because of Anaplan’s native integration with Salesforce, that account data flows directly into Lumen’s CRM, making it easy for managers to see how new accounts are scored, and why, in real-time.

Mellanie will be joining us at Dreamforce later this month to share how Lumen up-leveled territory and quota planning processes and generated 39% higher sales value and 6% higher seller attainment. You can sign-up to learn more about that session here.

Learn more at Dreamforce 2022

There are a lot of unknowns in the market today, but one thing is clear – siloed sales plans that leverage static, stale data make it nearly impossible for sales teams to deliver revenue growth. But with Anaplan, forward-thinking businesses like Lumen can build agile sales plan – backed by strong insights and delivered on time – to boost every facet of their go-to-market execution.

If you want to streamline your sales planning, level up your sales execution, and drive growth for your organization, stop by booth #325 during Dreamforce, September 20-22 to chat with an expert. Let’s make growth happen together.