Jim DeCesare 0:00:08.0 

I'm Jim DeCesare. I'm a regional vice president here at Anaplan, and with me today is Nic Keith. We're going to talk about accelerating sales planning and compensation. By the way, this is things that I do all day myself as a sales manager here so I know a little bit about it as well. Do you want to introduce yourself? 

 

Nic Keith 0:00:32.3 

Absolutely. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Nic Keith. I'm originally from the Lake Norman area which is a little bit north of Charlotte, North Carolina, but I came down here for school, went to the University of Georgia - go dogs - and then got my MBA at UNC back up in Chapel Hill in a finance concentration. I've been down here living in Atlanta. My wife's from Dunwoody. Been at UPS Capital for the last nine years. I've had a variety of different roles, mostly in sales, have done a little bit of digital solutions working with customers to implement different APIs, different technology solutions that we help service our customers, both at a small-to-mid-tier and an enterprise level. Really love UPS Capital because it's a really niche organization within a larger enterprise. I've still got buddies today that think I wear a brown jumpsuit to work every day and I'm out on the road delivering packages, and I don't. I'm sitting in an office. 

 

Nic Keith 0:01:34.5 

I've been in sales for a couple of years, gone through the sales leadership track. I've been in agile, done scrums, so I've learned how projects and data really flows throughout the organization, and I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly for how we use data and how we leverage it out in the market as we're talking with customers. It really makes a difference in how credible we are out in the market. If we're going and taking bad data to customers, the likelihood that we're able to service them properly and generate the capacity or revenue that we need in order to meet our quotas, it's an uphill battle. So really happy to be here. Thank you for getting me out of the office. I got to spend some time with my daughter and wife this morning, have breakfast, and it's great to be here with you guys. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:02:20.8 

Thanks for that introduction. By the way, I'm fascinated by what you guys do. Why don't you take us, Nic, through, we all know who UPS is. What is UPS Capital? What do you do? Take us through, because that's quite a fascinating business. You do more than just UPS stuff, right? You deal with FedEx and things like that. Do you want to explain that, please? 

 

Nic Keith 0:02:40.8 

Correct. Yes, absolutely. I spend a lot of time delineating between UPS and UPS Capital, especially last week over Thanksgiving. My family still gets confused. A lot of my buddies still get confused. UPS Capital is the financial services subsidiary of UPS. We're a licensed insurance agency. We act as a broker. We're highly regulated in the industry that we play in. We have our sellers out there acting as fiduciaries. Whenever we run into a customer out in the market, we try and understand their entire value chain. What does the complex supply chain look like? Are you domestic-only? Do you ship internationally? Imports, exports, so on and so forth, and regardless of where your inventory is moving throughout the global network, if you use UPS we've got a little bit better visibility, a little bit better operational capabilities to service those customers. The likelihood a customer is going to use one singular logistics provider for the entirety of their supply chain is pretty slim to none. We don't really run into it that much anymore. 

 

Nic Keith 0:03:44.5 

The services that we can extend, it really doesn't matter, and even the F word - which is FedEx - we can… If inventory is moving through FedEx… 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:03:56.1 

I didn't know where you were going with that, Nic. It's actually really good. 

 

Nic Keith 0:03:58.1 

PG, PG. Even Postal Service, last mile, gig economy, ocean container freight providers, locally, regionally, nationally, our services from a risk mitigation standpoint would be applicable for them. The goal and mission of UPS Capital is really to be the insurtech market leader by understanding our customers' entire value chain. Where can we improve cash flow? Where can we create efficiencies? Really all centered around how we help our customers provide the most high-level of experience from a customer and consumer standpoint. So one just quick example. My wife's a huge online shopper. Let's say, for example, you order something from Macy's, right? That package gets delivered, you get a delivery notification. You're at work. You're excited because a Christmas gift came early. You're ready to wrap it and go hide it. Well, when you get home from work the package is nowhere to be found. This is a common term that we call porch piracy, right? 

 

Nic Keith 0:04:59.9 

So when Nic Keith calls the Macy's customer service line and says, 'Hey, even though there might have been a delivery scan I don't see the package anywhere. Are you sure it was delivered? What do I need to do now?' Macy's really has two options. Do they trust the consumer that they didn't take that package inside and they're just looking for another item to be shipped to them, or do they say, 'Okay, hey, we're sorry that that happened to you. Here's another product that we're going to ship out tomorrow. We'll send you the tracking number,' and then our service is, they would be able to work with us to get that cash flow at the sales invoice value reimbursed back to them within 24 hours. So it's a big cash flow play from an insurance standpoint, and that is what I would consider our bread and butter. That is what our sales resources are out there talking to these companies about the vast majority of the time, but as we've evolved and as we've learned what the market is ultimately looking for we've got a lot more proactive in the predictive analytics side. 

 

Nic Keith 0:05:59.1 

A lot of these customers are saying, 'You're UPS. You have all this data. How can you supply that data to me so that me and my team can make better-informed business decisions around how we ship, what service levels we use?' What is the highest level of what we call chain of custody? One of our new products is called Delivery Defense. Delivery Defense is a proactive, generative AI machine learning tool where it actually populates through an API an address confidence score based on clustering, based on a lot of ZIP code and billions of data points that we have within UPS, so if a merchant or a Macy's of the world is shipping to a new consumer for the first time they get a score back from Delivery Defense, and if it makes sense for them to ship it to an access point, a UPS store, a FedEx location, whatever it may be, to make sure that end consumer gets the item that they've purchased, that is where we've started to shift away from just being a risk mitigation product, if you will, to a lot more around route optimization, inventory intelligence. 

 

Nic Keith 0:07:11.6 

How do we help companies strategically place inventory in warehouses located throughout the US to kind of compete with that Amazon effect? Our sellers have had to upskill themselves exponentially, and with that comes sales planning, compensation model build-out. How do we align to the organizational strategies that we have and that we communicate up through Carol Tomei, the CEO of UPS, and then trickle that down into how we build the sales design to drive behaviors from our producers out there in the market? We're about a $600 million… Just our UPS Capital component is about a $600 million topline business. We operate globally. We've got domestic sales teams, operations, the Americas, so Canada and Mexico. We've got groups out in Europe as well as APAC, and my responsibilities as the sales enablement director is sales operations for the global market. We've got enablement technologies, our CRM, our sales enablement platforms. We run an L&D team, learning and development. We've got lead generation and demand generation too. So that's just a little bit about UPS Capital and what we do. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:08:22.8 

You know, I'm sitting here listening to you, Nic, and our lives actually haven't crossed personally but I actually spend a lot of time with Pitney Bowes, so I know all about the last mile and the data they provide. They actually have last mile data and routing data they sell, probably to you or the big UPS. I also worked with General Electric, but it was funny because GE Capital became the finance arm, but became so big they spun it out. Anyway, our careers have been similar paths. That's interesting. [Unclear words 0:08:55.7] switch to Anaplan now. In 2021, what was the driving force that you guys needed and saw where you started thinking about implementing a tool like Anaplan? 

 

Nic Keith 0:09:06.5 

So really the big driving force for us was automation. We had multiple teams across multiple functions working through data integrity, synergizing our data into a centralized environment. At UPS Capital we tote that we're a digital company, so we like to build things ourselves, right? So a lot of homegrown capabilities, a lot of different worksheets that get manipulated into one shareable file, and it is painful for the sales resource because you go into one environment and you make the top-line revenue from your account base which you're responsible for, but in order to go determine the overall policy performance or the margin that you're getting from that account base you've got to go into an additional system. If you want to consolidate that together you've got to reach out to your marketing resources. You've got to reach out to other functions to help you compile that data and hope that it's true, hope that it's accurate, so that when you go take it to a customer they're not going to look at you like you have five heads saying, 'Wait a second, here's the data that I have.' That was years, from probably 2015 whenever I started at UPS Capital to really COVID, 2021, whenever we started having conversations around Anaplan. 

 

Nic Keith 0:10:28.1 

It was a hope and a prayer that the data you were taking out to the market was accurate, and that your compensation as also accurate in and of itself too. For us, having Anaplan come into the fold has really streamlined a lot of internal and external confidence which ultimately helps us create that credibility that we need. For us, prior to Anaplan, having the sales planning cycles, having the collaboration with our F&A and FP&A partners, it was a six-month journey every single year to be prepared for that next upcoming year. It was fatiguing. It took a lot of time and energy away from us focusing on more innovative, forward-looking strategies and initiatives that we were really focusing on for that next upcoming year. You've got 10 per cent of certain key resources and functions tied up in the sales planning methodology, going through data to make sure that it was directionally accurate, and then rolling it out. God forbid there needed to be a change, or there was a territory shift or a new product that came into the fold because the likelihood that you planned for it six months prior, those two things did not connect. 

 

Nic Keith 0:11:44.5 

For us it was a lot of scrambling and a lot of rip and replace in-year, which resulted in a lot of delays from a sales velocity standpoint. Ultimately, whenever we try to grow at 20 to 30 per cent top-line each and every year, when you don't have a tool like Anaplan it makes it very, very difficult for you to operationalize the data consistency, but also give the salesperson everything that they need in one centralized environment to go out there, meet the customer where they want to be met, and actually service them the way that they intend for us to serve them. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:12:23.5 

So you started with spreadsheets and multiple different systems, I guess, with no shared data and everybody… Then obviously, when you're in, a mid-year territory change takes a super amount of cycles to get it done. 

 

Nic Keith 0:12:36.5 

For sure. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:12:37.5 

Right? By the way, I can tell you it changes all the time. Territories change. People change. It doesn't ever stop. Anyway. So tell us, where are you… Three or four years ago, you started this journey. Where are you today? You basically went from a bunch of independent tools and apps that didn't work and communicate to where you are today. 

 

Nic Keith 0:13:02.8 

Yes, leaps and bounds. More ahead of where we were, even in 2021. So the first year that we rolled out Anaplan it was very minimal in nature, and complete transparency, we use Anaplan even today mainly for the ICM capabilities, right? The incentive compensation management capability. Thinking about what Jamie was saying earlier in the general session, the next layer of this thing is really getting that horizontal connectedness through our FP&A and finance and accounting teams. Right now, when we rolled it out in 2021 it was mainly just for revenue, margin, performance, metrics. How am I performing to my business plan each and every quarter? 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:13:45.7 

Yes, but that's finance. Are you talking about finance things now? Do you bleed over into finance, or you started out with ICM and territory? 

 

Nic Keith 0:13:53.0 

We're still leveraging ICM, but even the evolutions within the ICM capabilities has changed year over year, which is great. So 2021, within ICM, again very boilerplate. The revenue that we get from this customer, the claims expense that we pay whenever they file claims with us, what's the profitability of that account? You've got 250 accounts within your geo or within your patch. Your goal is to grow revenue by X per cent and margin by Y per cent. That's all that you're looking at as a sales producer in 2021. Again, as we've introduced new capabilities and new services in how we go to market, what we ca extend from a proactive standpoint around optimization, warehouse capacity and fulfilment, we've had to subtly evolve each and every year. Now we have the capability to tailor our sales compensation design with the organization's strategy. For example, we have strategic solutions that we drive, and we deliver better margin performance when certain solutions are placed in front of those customers, but being very methodical in how we design the business plan so that sellers aren't able to maximize their sales incentive payment just by focusing on one solution over another. 

 

Nic Keith 0:15:15.5 

We want to have a really balanced portfolio, so for us going from just that very cookie-cutter revenue, margin, performance, based on month, based on quarter, that I'm tracking year in and year out, now we've got multiple layers within our ICM capabilities. 2021 to 2022, subtle improvements. 2022 to 2023, you're able to recognize as we change our sales force. If I'm a salesperson here in Atlanta, Georgia, and I'm just focused on the 200 customers that I'm responsible for, that was 2021 and 2022. In 2023 we're like, 'Hey, great. Be a good account manager. Focus on these 200 customers that are in your patch with active policies with us, but hey, now we want to add a new logo business plan to you. We want you to go get $500,000 of net new revenue in 2023.' 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:16:11.2 

From non-installed base? 

 

Nic Keith 0:16:12.5 

From non-installed base. We wanted them to ultimately be a great account manager, focus on the margin and the profitability of that book of business, but we also wanted you to be a great acquisitioner. Go out and find new business. Go partner with your teams out in the field. Go join these different councils and get acclimated with the territory that you're in, and win us new business. Well, being able to display that and build and craft models and dashboards for visibility purposes to give our sales leaders opportunities to have really robust and granular conversations with their sales team, again, all centered around, 'What's the organization's strategy?' Are we trying to grow net new revenue because the book generally takes care of itself? You don't need someone just to be an account manager. The best way to motivate and rive sales behavior is to pay them for those efforts. For us, being nimble - which Anaplan has ultimately created that capability for us - we're able to throw out SPIFs. Gamifications for our sales teams. Create some friendly competition. 

 

Nic Keith 0:17:21.1 

'Hey, this quarter the greatest month-over-month or quarter-over-quarter top-line growth, that sales team is going to receive a quarterly incentive of $2,500.' Things like that historically, prior to Anaplan, would have taken months to operationalize, and that's the reason why we never did it. For us, aligning to the growth that the business was looking for, the growth that we've committed to our parent, Big Brown, Anaplan has helped us to be strategic and get really, really creative in how we design it to drive the behaviors for our sellers. We've seen phenomenal results for that since 2021, which is great. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:17:59.8 

So on the incentive compensation side you more easily could design territories and patches that drive the business programs, the profitable ones, the most important at the business at the time, so you design it and then what about the day-to-day? What value do you derive? I can tell you, I've been in sales a long time. I can see my commissions ahead, and I can actually go ahead and I can flag it if something's wrong and put a dispute in. Anyway, I'm just curious. I'm assuming also in the incentive compensation design you create what-if scenarios as well. 

 

Nic Keith 0:18:46.2 

Big time. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:18:46.5 

You look at them, and then you also… Tell us about both sides of it. The planning side, which you touched on already, but also the day-to-day once it's built. How is that working for you? 

 

Nic Keith 0:19:00.6 

It's a great point, and something I failed to mention. One of the other bit things that we did not really have in place in 2021 necessarily that we do have in place in 2024 is the connectivity with our other software that we leverage. So our CRM instance, that's really critical. You talk about the day-to-day. The two systems that our people are pulling up each and every day, first thing they do in the morning is they pull up Anaplan, see how they're tracking, see what the performance looks like based on their territory, based on their sales plan. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:19:27.8 

Who is this? Leadership or individual contributors, or both? 

 

Nic Keith 0:19:30.8 

Both sales leaders and the sales producers, all the way up really through our sales directors. They want to know what's going on. They want to make sure that they're doing better than the other sales director. 'How is my territory and my team performing?' and then layering that in with our CRM instance. From a leading indicator standpoint, which is what opportunities are entering the pipeline, what are our conversion rates within our buying journey, our customers' buying journey, how are we pulling deals through the pipeline and how does that ultimately translate into the lagging indicators which Anaplan ultimately will highlight and populate as to your performance based on the plan. Having those things connected, which again, this is the first year that we've actually had that connectivity, so there's data consistency across the multitude of environments. 

 

Nic Keith 0:20:18.1 

So cutting down on emails, cutting down on meetings to try to validate, 'Hey, I'm seeing this in Anaplan but I'm not recognizing that over here. What's going on? How do we fix that?' A lot of our time working with the Anaplan developers, working with folks like Spaulding Ridge to make sure we've configured it correctly to maximize productivity and efficiencies, that's how I would say we've really done a good job of tying in, 'What are our people doing day to day, and how does that then translate to the performance and the results that we're ultimately seeing?' One just quick thing too. We stood up an enterprise region… We had enterprise sales resources in years past, but there were four of them. Two rolled up through one regional sales manager and one national sales director, and then the other two rolled up through another leadership hierarchy. What we've done actually in about June this year, we created its own region. We ended up promoting and going through an interview cycle, so we now have a full-blown enterprise region with its own director, two regional sales managers, and ultimately 12 enterprise business development officers. 

 

Nic Keith 0:21:31.5 

With that came a lot of territory redesign. We took people from our middle market teams and ultimately promoted them and put this over here in this enterprise region. Then we had to go through backfilling cycles. You're taking about three levels of sales hierarchy and replenishing from the bench. One of the nice things that Anaplan's created for us is instead of putting these new people going into new territories on a scorecard, which is what we've historically had to do, it's, 'Hey, you didn't do all this work for the first two quarters. You're now getting into this territory starting in Q3.' Anaplan's helped us create capabilities where we now leverage baseline per cent effectiveness. If I'm a new person going into a new territory on a new team or whatever, if that person was 95 per cent effective to their net margin plan and 105 per cent effective to their new logo revenue plan, that's their now-baseline. Anything plus or minus from that entry starting point… 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:22:32.2 

That's an expected baseline for new, but you can measure against that baseline. 

 

Nic Keith 0:22:36.6 

Correct. That's the big thing, is measuring against that baseline. If someone's 55 per cent effective and having a really tough year, if you're now going into that territory you're not going to be penalized from a compensation standpoint. If you grow that territory from 55 per cent effective to 85 per cent effective, that ultimately looks like you're 130 per cent effective. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:22:56.0 

You just reminded me of something. You're doing incentive comp and territory and quota. Could you imagine not doing them together with the same system? 

 

Nic Keith 0:23:06.4 

Oh, it would take months. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:23:07.4 

What do you think it would be like? 

 

Nic Keith 0:23:09.8 

I personally… This is actually my first planning cycle. I got into the sales enablement role at the very beginning of this year, but being on the sales leadership side, sitting and waiting for what are our plans going to be, how are we supposed to hit this quota that we don't know about until mid-February, that's painful from a velocity standpoint, from a business lens, but even for the sellers. If you're first hearing about what your territory and what your quota's going to be, and how you then have to strategically map where you're going to spend your time and exert energy, if you're not getting that until the first half of Q1 you're already behind the eight ball. For us, having that in an isolated environment where we can do A/B testing, we can do a lot of modelling and scenario-based concepts, has really been wonderful for us because we can do it much, much faster. 

 

Nic Keith 0:24:03.0 

Again, going back to what would have taken four-to-six months, to now being able to do it in four-to-six weeks is drastically improved, both from an employee fatigue standpoint… The poor sales operations team, the poor BIA analyst spending nights building out these different models just so we can review it and play these what-if scenarios, now having it configured within a software that is nimble has been a game-changer for us, and it allows us to be a lot more transparent with our sales leaders and our salespeople and give them accurate insights into when things are coming, what due diligence are we doing on our side to build and design a plan that's attainable but also aggressive, where they're going to have visibility and insights within the tools that they're going into each and every morning to again figure out what they're going to prioritize and where they need to spend their time first as opposed to hunting in the dark, ultimately. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:25:01.7 

It's fascinating. We talked about where you were. We talked about where you guys are today within incentive compensation and territory management, how you do them together. Talk about the overlap. You touched on it with the incentive comp, the management and finance. Talk about that for a minute fi you don't mind. 

 

Nic Keith 0:25:31.1 

I'm very, very friendly with our FP&A teams and our controller, and our finance and accounting directors. What we're actually going through right now, we're well within our planning cycle. We're at the very, very tail end of it, thankfully. We should have every territory plan, designs, comp models for every single region globally by 18 December, which is great. So 18 December, you know exactly what you're going to have in front of you in 2025 compared to getting it mid-February. So, vast, vast difference in when we're actually rolling things out to our teams. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:26:04.7 

You think there's an economic value there you can quantify? By the way, we talk about it over time. You could take a month off, weeks off, or a day off. You're actually going to have more revenue because you're going to be selling faster. 

 

Nic Keith 0:26:19.1 

Totally. I would say at least $30 million to $40 million top-line. At least $30 million to $40 million top-line. By giving the assets out there that are going and making it happen and driving the revenue for the organization, giving them that much earlier prior to the calendar even flipping you're able to strategically plan who you're going to see, what seeds are you going to plant in November/December that are going to come to fruition come early Q1. The other thing about our solutions is, they're transactional. It might look great. 'Hey, I just sold a $250,000 deal in my CRM and it's moved to implement or producing,' but if they don't utilize that solution and actually we get that pull-through, you're not going to really do a good job of attaining your quota because the customer might not ultimately start leveraging it until April or May, and then whatever that annualized revenue gain that you're anticipating, you can go and cut that by 40 to 50 per cent ultimately. So having it in place much earlier is phenomenal. 

 

Nic Keith 0:27:25.0 

The other thing too… We're not quite there yet because our finance and the planning teams are not leveraging the capabilities of Anaplan. That's a big, big forward-looking goal that we have in 2025, and we'll talk about that in a little bit, but right now our finance and accounting team love going into Anaplan. Having access in Anaplan for them from a forecasting and a waterfall modelling for our senior staff and our parents - not real parents but our leadership team over at the Big Brown - but right now we have a monthly management report that comes out. Right around probably this time will be the November management report that our F&A group will leverage to then use for forward-looking assumptions, modelling out where we're going to finish the year, so on and so forth. Anaplan from an ICM standpoint and what our sales producers and what our leaders are looking at, whenever a customer files a claim and we issue that cash flow back to them, and that claims expense hits, that flows immediately into Anaplan. 

 

Nic Keith 0:28:31.9 

For them to go and look at a region level, at a district level, territory level, they have much more real-time access to what the expense, the cost of goods sold looks like. For them, I always I get emails from them at least weekly where they're like, 'Hey, this is what I saw in Anaplan. Can you validate this? Am I looking at this right?' because they don't look at it every day. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:28:55.0 

This is the finance folks. 

 

Nic Keith 0:28:56.5 

The finance folks. They want to look at it every day but they don't know how to maximize what the data's showing quite yet. We have working sessions. We host office hours. I go up there and sit with them on the fifth floor a lot to help them see the capabilities. One of the things that I'd love to do more with Courtney and the Anaplan team is get some best practices down for companies that are leveraging the FP&A capabilities within Anaplan and help highlight that for our finance and accounting team so that we can even further synergize the efforts between our cross-functional teams, because I see a lot of benefit and a lot of value that we maybe haven't fully tapped into quite yet. So that's on the horizon. That's on the roadmap and we're really, really excited about it, but right now it's a lot of hand-holding, a lot of sitting down with them, doing screen shares, helping them understand what the tool is showing us, how our salespeople are using it, and how the finance and accounting teams can leverage that real-time data as opposed to waiting for the monthly management report to come out. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:29:59.0 

The finance organization gives you your quota. 

 

Nic Keith 0:30:02.2 

That is correct. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:30:03.6 

Now, my understanding is you could put a dummy number in there until you have it because they're generally late. Are they generally late for it, behind cycle? So you put a number in as a guess that will filter down, but then you can change it. 

 

Nic Keith 0:30:17.5 

That's exactly right. We'll model out… Let's say, for example, we're in October. We'll do an actuals plus two, right, to see… 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:30:24.9 

Plus two per cent? 

 

Nic Keith 0:30:25.9 

No, plus two for two months of forecast. We'll say, 'Okay, our actuals through October are X. Based on these trends we're going to be at Y by year-end.' So whenever the finance and accounting teams go and get the plan blessed by the staff level at UPS they'll come down with us and say, 'Hey, here's the organizational plan.' Then we look at it from a sales produce lens, region, territory, globally, and then we spread that plan, apply ramp-up, and that's when we do a lot of our scenario-based modelling within Anaplan to say, 'Okay, well if we spread it like this or we put more concentration into our channel partner and a technology integration team versus our SMB team, what does that imbalance look like?' We really try to get as close to parity as we possibly can based on how our people get compensated, because it does tier based on the sales level that you are. For us, getting that plan from F&A which does normally get elongated, and it takes a little bit of time… The other interesting thing too is, our finance and accounting teams plan at the product level. 

 

Nic Keith 0:31:35.9 

So product A, we're looking at this type of revenue growth. Product B, C, and so on and so forth. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:31:41.0 

Really? So you could actually get that granularity in your comp plans too, or close to it. 

 

Nic Keith 0:31:46.2 

Correct, but we tend to steer away from that from a sales planning methodology. So figuring out ways… That's what Anaplan's also been really good at. It's able to… As data comes in we can frame it, configure it, map it to what the sales plan is ultimately going to be designed as. Because we don't want our sellers to only focus on one product versus another product, mainly because you might not be servicing the customer the right way… If I'm crushing my product A business plan and I'm doing well on my product B business plan, guess what I'm going to be going to every customer talking about. My product C that I'm only 50 per cent effective in. The likelihood that product C is going to be a great fit for each and every business that you're going to run into is highly unlikely. Taking that, consolidating it down, blending those different product-level quotas together and then spreading that through our different regions, and being very collaborative with our sales leadership team… I will say, for me coming from sales leadership into this sales enablement space, it might have been an overcommitment but the biggest commitment I made was, 'Let's build this and talk about it together.' Right? 

 

Nic Keith 0:32:54.1 

I want to hear your feedback. I want to understand if you think this is attainable. If you think it's the wrong type of spread or the wrong type of ramp-up based on the macroenvironment, things that are happening within that respective region or territory, let's understand what that looks like so that we can design it so that we can be successful. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:33:15.2 

Got it. We're going to go to questions. My last question from me is, what's the immediate short term? What's the next 12 months look like for you besides the finance piece? I understand that. I understand why you're doing it. By the way, usually I've seen it the other way. Finance would drive the revenue plan and so on, but you guys… It's okay. Beside that, what's next for you? 

 

Nic Keith 0:33:36.0 

So international's our big one, so getting Europe, getting APAC fully configured within Anaplan from an ICM standpoint. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:33:44.3 

So they're not there yet. 

 

Nic Keith 0:33:46.1 

Poor fellows are still working off spreadsheets. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:33:48.8 

Got it, and I'm sure their compensation plans are going to be different as well. 

 

Nic Keith 0:33:51.9 

Very different, and that's the beauty of, again, Anaplan. Getting them configured in Anaplan allows us to have the element of speed and velocity, but also going back to employee fatigue I know the individuals that work on the Europe compensation modelling and I know the folks that work on the APAC compensation modelling, and they are not loving their job around this time of year because of some of the manual processes that we have. Again, for us to forward-looking model out what their design, from what we get from F&A within Anaplan… We have to be strategic when we show that to the sales leaders and producers within a nice, clean user interface, and give them visibility in how you can toggle and how you can configure the data within Anaplan. They want it yesterday, right? We're not quite there yet. We're doing a lot of work right now to get those international regions configured in there. I'd say that's the closest thing near-term, and then furthermore getting the FP&A capabilities from a consistent planning, both on the sales lens as well as also at the organizational level, those are the two big rocks that we have that we're looking at ahead of us. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:35:00.1 

By the way, I'm fascinated. I love this stuff. I love hearing about it. Thank you. Any questions from the audience? Yes. With the light I can't really see. I'm blinded. 

 

Audience 0:35:18.4 

Hi, my name is Jen and I'm from Databricks' Anaplan COE, and I actually do sit more towards the finance umbrella. We are going through our journey actually from the other direction, starting with the finance, and we've recently rolled out our T&Q this year. Having said that, Jim's really touched on a lot of the questions that were popping up in my head already, but I would like to hear a little bit more about your experience, the bi-directional communication between finance team leveraging your insights coming from your planning and compensation model. Do they currently leverage the information that you provide from your model in their financial forecasting, like for example their commissions forecasting or their revenue forecasting, or is that really still being used more as an additional information that they have on their end? 

 

Nic Keith 0:36:15.0 

I'd say absolutely both, so from a territory standpoint but also in SIP budgeting. I say SIP. The sales commission budget that we have across all of our producers globally. Depending on again the design and the organizational strategy whenever we talk about creating floors, so hey, if a salesperson has not met 70 per cent effectiveness on their quota they're not eligible for that quarterly compensation, they'll look at lagging indicators of, 'What does the sales force look like today?' and how does that help us think forward of, 'Do we need to throw more dollars? Do we need to design it in a way to where we remove these floors, remove the decelerators and put more emphasis on the accelerators? How do we get more to drive behavior from a company standpoint?' From a budgeting standpoint we meet regularly for 2025. That's what we've been doing for the last, I'd say, probably two to three months, just having a lot of weekly meetings, helping them understand what we're looking to roll out from a sales planning methodology so that they can think through what that means at the product level. 

 

Nic Keith 0:37:26.1 

If our product mix looks like this right now, but we really want to shift that to look like something different or have a different blend, then that's where we're meeting with F&A very, very regularly to help them craft and tailor what the organization's plan is ultimately going to call for and what some of those cost of goods from an SIP expense standpoint would be. That's all the way down to the territory level. Whenever we sit and help them understand, 'Where are our people located? Where are the customers located? How are you crafting these different territories and where does that revenue concentration and margin concentration live today?' that is where F&A becomes our best friend, because they're not thinking about it necessarily like that. Whenever we can give them additional context around how we're building out new regions, how we're designing the sales plan and SIP design to try to drive behaviors, that's music to their ears because at the end of the day, whenever we look at cost of compensation, of margin… So for every dollar of margin that comes into the organization, how much sales commission are we paying out? 

 

Nic Keith 0:38:35.4 

That's another metric that I failed to hit earlier, but we've seen that from 2022 to 2024 grow 1.8 times, and it's all coming down to the collaboration with F&A, building the design… 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:38:47.1 

Because you can see the margin and you can focus on those products that are higher-margin. 

 

Nic Keith 0:38:50.4 

Correct. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:38:50.8 

And actually the salespeople get paid more money because they're selling higher-margin product. 

 

Nic Keith 0:38:55.0 

Correct. Again, being a regulated industry we steer away from commission-based structures, so, 'Hey, if you sell this product you're going to get 12 per cent of the revenue coming in, or the margin. If you sell those products you're only going to get seven per cent.' We don't necessarily do it like that, but just naturally from the trends that we've seen our products, and the performance of those products, certain products are going to perform better marginally than other products, so being very strategic with F&A to make sure they're designing the business plan based on those different product level growth trajectories and then layering that into the territory and the producer level. We meet with them, I would say, twice a week for basically the back half of the year to make sure that we're in lock-step with one another so that we're prepared and ready for that next upcoming year. 

 

Audience 0:39:44.4 

Thank you. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:39:46.3 

Any other questions? Oh, right here. 

 

Audience 0:39:49.5 

Hi. A couple of technical questions in terms of operating Anaplan. Starting with territory, I don't know how to say it in the UPS Capital language but in technology we have territories that are serving our sales force, and then we have presales, customer success, and professional services, so they don't necessarily align with the territories that were defined. So first question is, if you have that challenge how do you handle it? Then, number two, territory design and quota allocation. If you do that, do you actually do that in Anaplan, bringing senior leaders and managers into Anaplan, or do you do that offline and then just bring the results back internally? 

 

Nic Keith 0:40:32.7 

Great questions. The first question, similar set-up. We've got a lead generation team of people that are just activating existing policy-holders or existing customers. How do we get more out of them? How do we make sure that we've got the right solution in place where they see value, and their willingness to pay is at its absolute highest? 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:40:53.4 

Sort of like an inside team. 

 

Nic Keith 0:40:55.3 

Inside team sitting in the office. It's actually right up the road in Sandy Springs. We also have some resources out in Texas in Fort Worth, but we also have the customer success resources too. All the performance from those groups are in Anaplan, but they're not necessarily going into Anaplan to track performance because they're not compensated that way. The interesting thing for our lead generation team, it is not aligning to the territory. Those lead generation resources, we look at it more from a capacity utilization standpoint. If we've got 20 lead generation resources we want each of them to have roughly 150 accounts, opportunities, prospects, that they're running through a cadence through our top-end sales engagement platform, which is Salesloft. Right now, if someone has extra capacity to take on more opportunities that are maybe being fed through marketing, or there's inbound leads coming through our website, we don't want to have to wait for someone that's just aligned to that respective territory based on where the customer's located. 

 

Nic Keith 0:42:00.3 

We do find that we have to be really collaborative with our sales leadership teams out there, because every sales leader's like, 'I need more leads. Why aren't you sending us more leads?' We again work with them very regularly to make sure that we're creating a sense of parity. How do we spread this strategically? What regions are maybe suffering more than other regions? How do we spread the love, if you will, strategically to where we're not cannibalizing our own energy and the revenue opportunity by only giving certain opportunities to people that are just isolated to that geo? While the sales force is orchestrated that way, our lead generation and top-of-funnel teams are not orchestrated in that way. Then, from a territory and quota standpoint, it's the latter. We do it outside of Anaplan, but then use Anaplan to model out and play with different scenario base, do some A/B testing to figure out, 'Is this the right spread of territory?' 

 

Nic Keith 0:43:02.8 

Historically, back in the spreadsheet days we would use the NFL model. If there's multiple NFL teams… 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:43:09.5 

NFL city model? 

 

Nic Keith 0:43:10.7 

Yes. NFL city model. If there's multiple NFL teams within this respective geo, that's a territory A. There's going to be more opportunity. There's more corporate businesses that are having boxes in that NFL stadium, and if you're in this geo over here and there's not an NFL team, or there's only one, well, that's a territory B. Anaplan lets us get much, much deeper, more granular in how we're designing the territories to really try to go out there and maximize customer experience first and foremost - we want to service these customers - but that always comes with being able to generate revenue and hit our growth trajectory that we're looking at for the upcoming year. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:43:51.1 

We have another minute. Any other questions? 

 

Unknown Speaker 0:43:54.2 

Any other questions? 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:43:56.7 

Courtney, of course. 

 

Audience 0:44:02.7 

Okay. So you've really spoken about a lot of the innovation that you guys prioritize at UPS Capital and then how Anaplan was able to come in and support that, and at Anaplan we are fortunate enough to have an amazing partner network, but we also have an amazing PS team. I just wanted to hear from you what the impact working with our PS team has been for you guys. 

 

Nic Keith 0:44:23.6 

It's been phenomenal. We're not experts by any means, so for us asking creative questions, getting line of sight into what other market leaders and what companies from other industries are even contemplating or what they're trying… I would even say that one of the biggest things that I've really seen this year is the creativity that comes with our developers that are dedicated to our build-out specifically. Having ideation sessions and… I might not be the one physically doing that or driving that, but when my team comes to me and they're like, 'Hey, we've got something really creative, really unique. We want to spend some time walking you through it,' I'm kind of a gatekeeper at that point because I'm like, 'This is almost so good that everybody out there is going to love it. How do I shift this and make sure that these people are blessing it, and it also aligns with the organization's strategy?' Because there are so many capabilities, and because we always get introduced to new things from yourself and the rest of the team, I then have to be methodical and like, 'Okay, is this a backlog item? Is this something we need to prioritize? What are the implications with CRM?' 

 

Nic Keith 0:45:37.8 

So those are the things going through my head, but every single time I get something coming across my desk it is really eye-opening for me, and it takes me a little bit of time because I'm not living and breathing it each and every day, but the team's been phenomenal. Very, very helpful and engaging. I've been very, very appreciative of the work that the group's been able to provide to us. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:46:02.6 

Well, thank you. I think we're out of time, but thank you, Nic, so much. I really appreciate it. Impressive guy. You take all the product and they work, but it's really the people on the top who are thinking about this innovation. So congratulations to you. Impressive. 

 

Nic Keith 0:46:16.2 

Well, I appreciate that. 

 

Jim DeCesare 0:46:16.6 

Great conversation. Great to meet you, and thank you for joining us. 

 

Nic Keith 0:46:19.5 

Thanks a lot, Jim. Thank you for having me. 

 

Unknown Speaker 0:46:22.0 

Thank you both. Great session.