Sales Forecasting in Anaplan vs Salesforce.com

Sales Forecasting in Anaplan vs Salesforce.com. No comparison.	Anaplan	Salesforce.com
Week-over-week changes
Slice & Dice, (Sales Angles)
What-if; ʻGet Back on Trackʼ
Rep Performance
Support: anyone instant chat, phone and App Coach Appointment
Extendability

Week-over-Week Changes

SFDC is basically a ʻstatelessʼ system. Therefore it only has the up to the minute forecast. It does not retain history for comparison. To achieve this the following workflow would be necessary:

The compare feature in Anaplan extends the lead further. Itʼs possible to on-the-fly compare any base metric, (say compare all reps against a high-performer or compare this quarter with last quarter). In addition on-the-fly comparisons between weeks, [versions] is achieved at the simple click of a button, all with full color-coding alerting.

Slice & Dice

Looking at a different ʻanglesʼ of your reps, regions, opportunities, customers and other key forecast metrics is critical to seeing the real picture. As shown in the illustration above, non-Anaplan users have to create a separate data table in their spreadsheet to then create a pivot table. Reporting from this pivot table is also challenging.

Result after slicing:

Anaplan comes out-of-the-box with slicer, a more sophisticated version of pivot tables. The ability to instantly see another angle of the forecast is critical to having a 360° view of performance.

What-if; ʻGet Back on Trackʼ

Itʼs one thing for a solution to tell you that you have performance issues, (many BI solutions do that), but itʼs a totally different situation when you want the solution to help you get the answer and show you what the impact of your decisions to get back on track will be. Anaplan does just that.

To achieve this in either SFDC or a spreadsheet would take a huge effort to design and code. In SFDC you would need a completely new forecasting App built, presumably built on the force.com platform, using SOQL which is a DB code not a multidimensional calculation engine code. In a spreadsheet, just the calculation to determine what the impact would be by changing a date of an opportunity would be on the forecast would be tough, let alone then changing itʼs sales stage as well and seeing the pipeline analysis change.

If you did achieve this in a spreadsheet, you would have to ensure that the new batch of opportunities that came in next week, with all their changes were reflected in the formulas. No mean feat and a maintenance nightmare.

Rep Performance

The only thing that SFDC tracks is quota but only when you are using the forecasting module of SFDC, which in our experience is rarely used. Tracking performance in a spreadsheet is really your only option. Anaplan tracks all the major rep performance metrics, including ramp, quota attainment, pipeline coverage, forecast vs plan etc etc. These are all based off of the current SFDC forecast, automatically updated for you.

Support: anyone instant chat, phone and App Coach Appointment

With such a critical business process, Anaplan offers for all levels of subscribers the ability from within the product to instant chat with a support expert for not just technical assistance but application usage help to ensure customers get the most from the solution. This is available to anyone using Anaplan, not just the administrator.

Extendability

The sales forecast drives all sorts of other business processes. Thatʼs why, with Anaplan your solution doesnʼt have to stop at forecasting. You can extend your solution by adding additional, connected modules. This can be done by the customer with the help of an Anaplan App Coach at any time. No need for expensive consultants or complex SOQL code. The Anaplan platform allows for full extendability of your application in days, not months.

The Salesforce.com Forecast

And finally, what does the SFDC forecast look like?