Becca Buell 0:00:07.4 

Thanks, everyone, for choosing to attend track two. My team and I have been advising Flexera over the past year and a half, and they've been on an incredible journey on their go-to-market, territory, and quota use cases, and they've been an amazing team to work with. Really excited for all of you in the room to get to see a first-hand sneak preview of why that is. Their executives when we first started this journey were really direct and transparent about what success looks like, and what the outcomes that were needed with this initiative, and it really helped all of us to galvanize and work through that across Spaulding Ridge, Anaplan, and Flexera. We really worked as a joint tiger team to accomplish those outcomes, and we've really done it, I like to say, very freaky fast. It was a very fast appointment, and also we did it with some fun jokes along the way. By way of introduction, my name's Becca Buell. I'm a partner at Spaulding Ridge and my career has primarily been in the digital transformation space in the tech and telco industries over the past decade. 

 

Becca Buell 0:01:14.5 

Back before Spaulding Ridge I was actually in all of y'all's shoes. I worked at Twilio, so I definitely have an appreciation for the journeys that everyone's going through, and you started hearing earlier today. For me personally, the reason why I love tech, media, and telco as an industry is the innovation that comes through and also the value that's able to be realized, not just for the companies but also for the individuals themselves that work at those companies, able to get time back with their families, able to do more analytical work and invest in their own development, and I think Flexera's a really great example of that. From the innovation in AI you heard earlier today, I think Flexera's only skimming the surface and has a lot more to get out of the Anaplan platform. Without further ado I want to introduce the panelists here on the stage with me. Quick heads up, I am going to be… We're going to be engaging the audience for participation as a part of our intro, so we're going to be handing out and asking a few questions, and we've got some candy that we'll be giving to those brave folks who speak up. To start, Valerie, I'll start with you. If you can share your name, a little bit of background, and the question for audience. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:02:29.6 

Absolutely. Hi, everyone. My name's Valerie Roberson. I'm a Senior Manager of Revenue Operations at Flexera. I've been there about a year and a half. Prior to that I was in sales and operations at a public safety software company, so I've spent a lot of time in software. I also have a little bit of corporate FP&A experience, so I definitely love utilizing that in terms of putting my sales brain on and utilizing the metrics and data that ultimately support a successful sales business. In terms of Flexera, what we do, we provide a SaaS-based IT solution for organizations looking to understand their complex IT environment. We actually primarily are focused in on the up-market space, I would say. I will circle back to that for my fun question, or can I pepper it in now? 

 

Becca Buell 0:03:20.3 

You go for it. Whatever you're feeling 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:03:21.3 

I would like to pepper it in now, actually. We do engage a significant portion - I should say a material portion - of the Fortune 500 companies. They are currently Flexera customers. I have rounded to the nearest five. Can anyone guess what percentage of the Fortune 500 are current Flexera customers? Anyone? There's no penalty for wrong answers. 

 

Becca Buell 0:03:48.5 

Racquel has candy for you, right or wrong. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:03:55.8 

Sixty per cent? You've very close. A touch high. 

 

Becca Buell 0:04:01.5 

There you go. Thank you for your participation, yes. Any of you want more? You want more. Anyone else have another guess? 

 

Audience 0:04:10.7 

Fifty-five. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:04:12.8 

You're very, very close. I'm going to go ahead and say the answer. It's rounded to 50 per cent. It's 48 per cent of the Fortune 500 are current Flexera customers. We have six of the largest ten in terms of the top ten in that space, eight of the ten largest banks in the US, so really think a complex IT environment. That's where you're going to find a Flexera customer. Some background to our team. We recently, earlier this year, underwent an acquisition of a smaller, call it mid-market to down-market competitor in Snow. They're based in Stockholm, Sweden. They really enriched our EMEA side of the house in terms of not only sales ops team members over there, which really led into - and I won't spoilt it too much - but really led into some of the reason for us ending up needing Anaplan as a solution for our territory and quota modelling. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:05:14.5 

One last comment in terms of the sales operations structure. We have about 15 team members right now with the new combined Snow and Flexera, one business. We have about 15 sales ops members. This includes myself - I'm primarily on the reporting and analytics side, territory and quota falls into that - as well as our field and business partnering. We manage a team of around 100 direct quota carriers. Some leaders also would layer on to that. I know the number has increased with the acquisition, but the last number I can remember off the top of my head is about $450 million in ARR a year. Just to give you guys a glimpse of the size and how our team is structured. 

 

Becca Buell 0:05:58.5 

Thanks for the background. Danny, do you want to go next? 

 

Danny Lane 0:06:00.4 

Yes, absolutely. Great to have everyone joining us for this session. My name's Danny Lane. I'm a Senior Architect here at Spaulding Ridge. I've been with the company for about three-and-a-half years and primarily focused on high-tech B2B solutions. Prior to Spaulding Ridge I came from the restaurant industry and always enjoyed figuring out technical solutions to make my job and my team's job easier so we could work out efficiency and improve our operations, and then decided to start doing that full-time. I'm really happy to be invited here, for the opportunity, and as it pertains of Flexera Valier and her team were great clients of ours to be able to work together, to figure out solutions. It wasn't a perfect roadmap, but it was great getting through it together and delivering a successful solution for you. I'll ask my trivia question for the day. Spaulding Ridge, we're a global operation. We've got clients as well as employees around the world, but I was wondering if anyone could take a guess at what per cent of our bandmates are outside the US. 

 

Becca Buell 0:07:15.9 

For those that don't know, Spaulding Ridge has a music theme, so our bandmates are our employees. That's just translation. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:07:22.9 

That's the fun fact! 

 

Becca Buell 0:07:24.9 

That is a fun fact. 

 

Danny Lane 0:07:27.5 

Any guesses in the back? 

 

Audience 0:07:30.2 

Twenty-five. 

 

Danny Lane 0:07:31.4 

Twenty-five? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:07:33.1 

A little bit higher. 

 

Danny Lane 0:07:34.0 

A little bit higher. Somewhere in the middle there. You're getting there. Almost. Let's get a little hotter here. It's about 50 per cent. I think I heard someone at the last minute say that. 

 

Becca Buell 0:07:52.7 

Great. Well, thanks for humoring us, folks in the room, on answering a little interaction here. To get started, I really wanted to ask Valerie to get started on sharing your journey with the use cases that you're currently using and where you started and why, so what was happening in the current state and why you were choosing to optimize. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:08:15.6 

Yes, absolutely. We run on a calendar so it would have been last year at this time that we were mid of territory planning again, but with just Flexera. This was prior to our acquisition with Snow closing. We had done the Excel spreadsheets. Really, that was our go-forward plan. We really started some conversations on Anaplan, but frankly by the time we had got to the table it was too late. It was just a completely not-feasible timeline and we just had to get going, so we went ahead again with our spreadsheets which takes a lot of work. You have in our case maybe 10 to 15 leaders. We're taking data out of Salesforce. We're manipulating it. We're adding in all of these disparate data sources, hoping we get it right, hoping there's no issues with our formulas, and then ultimately parsing them out, sending them a shared file that someone will then download, edit, send back. It was just a mess. That was what we had done for last year, kick-off of 2024 territories. The Snow acquisition ended up closing in February and what do you know? We had to redo territories again in July, again using the spreadsheets. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:09:31.5 

I think that was really the breaking point for us of the lift that it's taking on our team, the burnout that we're managing, is just unsustainable. We spent so much time just getting the job done. It's almost like we got to the end of the process and we weren't able to actually look back and tell if we'd done a good job or not because you spend so much time just working in those sheets and trying to get the first pass right. By the end you're scrambling. I'd say those were our biggest challenges and probably the biggest reason that we started revisiting again the implementation of Anaplan. Of course, by this time… I think our territories finalized some time in July, so we looked back and I believe my leaders were having conversations with you even slightly before then saying, 'Hey, we still need to be ready to kick off 2025 territories. What can we stand up in three months knowing that we have to build it from…' I don't want to say scratch, but jump into a tool that we've never used before, set it up, link everything together, make it usable for our processes, test, and eventually go live all within that short timeframe. So that was really the challenges that we were looking at, and how we ended up coming to Anaplan as the right solution to fix them. 

 

Becca Buell 0:10:54.9 

It sounds like a combination of the operational strain as well as the ability to move quickly and agile with transparency for your sales leaders. Is that why you had confidence too? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:11:04.3 

Absolutely. Absolutely. 

 

Becca Buell 0:11:06.4 

Danny, can you share a bit about how we went about advising Flexera and Valerie and the team on how to take that challenge and bring a solution forward? 

 

Danny Lane 0:11:14.2 

Yes. We started off by understanding what the needs of the business were, and we recognized that there was major headaches going on in their territory carving process, in their headcount management and headcount reporting, as well as their quota setting, which they used rule-based quotas, and we were able to develop a very easy and quick understanding that we could find a solution together. A lot has to go to the credit of Valerie and Rob and her team, and their ability to recognize that they wanted to improve their systems. They had problems but they didn't necessarily know what the solution was. They were willing to work with us and find a solution together. That was massively critical to our ability to present them with the best solution we felt would work for their team. Again, to their process, they had some rules in place that they wanted to implement. They knew they wanted to be able to create equitable territories. They were having problems trying to be able to evaluate if they were doing that and running into attrition problems as a result. 

 

Danny Lane 0:12:29.8 

We felt like the T&Q app was a solution that we were able to develop that again, with slight customizations, the bulk of the work was already there. We could help bring a middle ground that would be helpful for you. Then, Valerie, as you mentioned earlier, we were up against a really tight timeline and we were able to develop a solution in about ten weeks, so about a 10 to 30 per cent savings in the time it took to deliver that solution for them. So really, I think those three factors came together and helped us to get to our point today where we can say that we were able to deliver a successful outcome that gave Valerie and her team the rewards that they were looking for. 

 

Becca Buell 0:13:15.7 

I think for those of you in the room who are listening in, the T&Q app is a really incredible innovation that the Flexera business model was a really good fit for. There was a lot of alignment with how the territory rules, how the workflow with sales management and ops worked together as well, and I think it was really interesting also how flexible you were to take the best practices and some of the account-level targets and match that up to create an equitable go-to-market plan. So really huge kudos to both that technology itself and the Flexera business model for mirroring together. Up on the screen you'll see our approach for how to leverage an effective sales planning process. What's really exciting is that the left-hand side for both territory setting and quota planning are all modules in the T&Q app, and then there's other complementary datasets that you can augment and modelling that can be done to support that, so really interesting. Valerie, I'm curious. With this T&Q app, what did you like best with having a starting point or an accelerator? What was your experience with that? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:14:26.6 

So it was really fast. I want to say when we first started meeting with the team we spent the first two weeks, I want to say, being honest here, really the Spaulding Ridge team trying to understand, 'Hey, what is your process? What does it look like today? Okay, here's how you think about quotas. Here's how you think about territories. Explain that to me. Walk me through everything you have today.' Past that two weeks we were basically… I don't want to say live in the system, but we were looking at the app and we were understanding, 'Okay, here is how I would be interacting with this in a future state. Actually, I like seeing things at this level and not this level. Could you pull in this instead of that?' and then Danny and the team really going back, making those changes, and then call it the next day or sometime later that week being able to take a look at what we had proposed and come back with a solution that maybe it worked, maybe it needed a little bit of tweaking, but regardless we didn't have to start from scratch, which is really not something that we had the time to even be contemplating. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:15:27.8 

So it was really awesome to be able to just jump in almost right away - effectively right away - and start playing around and looking at those, and then tweaking small things we needed to for our purposes. 

 

Becca Buell 0:15:39.2 

Sounds like a lot of agile interaction and time-to-value very quickly. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:15:44.5 

For sure, yes. 

 

Becca Buell 0:15:46.9 

For capabilities and dashboards, were there any new features that you didn't have exposure to from your current process? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:15:53.9 

Yes. Actually, one of the biggest pain points in our processes, in our Salesforce we have a parent-child relationship, so it's the organization and it's the accounts within, which could be in different locations and things like that. Previously, when we were doing Excel, our Excel-based spreadsheets, we would only be able to plan at the organization level. We just did not have the room even in the file to be able to bust out all that detail for the account level. When we're in Anaplan that parent-child relationship, and actually seeing the transparency because there are reasons you need to be able to see and plan at that lower level, that was a huge benefit to us to be able to show the RVPs, 'Here are the accounts, not only the organization but these specific accounts, that are both in your geo, out of your geo, that you and your team will end up owning and maintaining.' That was a huge process improvement for us. Something else that we didn't have in Excel that was something we were able to layer into Anaplan was, obviously, when you kick out to Excel you're kind of stuck with that file that you've sent. Even if you've shared it, again, people take it offline, they edit it, they make their changes and that file you've shared is no longer being used. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:17:14.3 

Something we're able to do in Anaplan is an approval routing, so if RVP A wants to kick something over to RVP B it's really easy. Just process it right through. It goes through a layer of approval with myself, other members of the sales ops team, to make sure we get eyes on it. It was huge in terms of transparency, and I really think that was one of the biggest benefits of the entire process was just the transparency to the RVPs and getting them the freedom and the ability to make the best territories that they can from the get. 

 

Becca Buell 0:17:45.1 

For those in the room that have navigated sales operations, and business partnering with sellers that are nervous about hitting their quotas or frustrated that they don't have an equitable quota or an appropriate territory, I think what Valerie and team were able to glean is getting more intelligent and stable quotas that everybody was bought in on. It's something that I think is going to help. You're starting to see… I don't want to steal your thunder, but you're starting to see some of the benefits of it. Danny, do you have anything else to add, or any other considerations that are benefits from the app? 

 

Danny Lane 0:18:19.3 

Yes. I think one point to call out was the value of the configurator. For those who aren't aware, as a part of the T&Q app, before you even build out the T&Q app, Anaplan provided us a template really to fill out and complete. That template was leveraged to create the app itself. What that allowed us to do was go through our foundation sessions in a direct manner, understanding what the requirements were for the tool, what conversations did we need to have to understand what the business needs were going to need for the app, what level of planning are they looking for, and also making sure that we had the conversations to ensure that we could get the data provided that would support the business needs. That was really helpful, doing those foundation sessions. In addition, with the app, when you first get it out of the box there's a lot of pages, a lot of functionality, and a lot of capabilities that we could get caught up in. What you and your team did a really good job of is, came into the conversations knowing this is what you wanted. We're not going to get caught up in all the bells and whistles that the tool has to offer. 

 

Danny Lane 0:19:33.3 

Let's focus on the immediate needs of the business. Later on we can talk about what those other opportunities are that we can proceed, but let's hone in on the objective here to hit our goals. 

 

Becca Buell 0:19:46.0 

I think that's something that I, having been doing implementations for a long time, have really appreciated with the Anaplan app, is that you get all the features and you can roll them out to your organization as the company is ready for them. I think it's really great from a change management that your RVPs are taking the most high-priority pieces. Can you share some of the challenges, Valerie, that you faced as you were going through this process and how you overcame them? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:20:17.4 

Yes, absolutely. Well, one, something that I think everyone deals with is bad and messy data in Salesforce, especially with the acquisition. We had two sets of Salesforces merging into one, essentially finishing that right before we loaded it into Anaplan. That being said, it was actually great because it allowed us the transparency to be able to see where these issues were and fix them before 1 Jan, so that's one thing. Unfortunately, can't fix that with Anaplan, but it is something that Anaplan helped identify which I think is really great. Again, to my comment earlier, the transparency on the account-level planning is something that has been really, really huge. It was a big pain point, and I also know the way that we had to adjust the routing rules in Anaplan to account for if you move an org, what accounts within that org move, that was something that we really had to workshop and work through how those rules worked, when they should do this and when they shouldn't do that. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:21:26.0 

We started scoping a little bit on the rules engine. Ultimately, to the point earlier, it was a want not a need to get to end-of-project. It's something that I'd love to take back and see if we can work through for future years. Danny, you had touched on it earlier, but the quota piece. Quota reporting, we were spending so much time on the territories process in previous years that by the time we got to the quota piece and understanding the quota reporting there was a huge gap in time, and we were just rushing to get to the end of job hoping that we had enough quota overallocation to cover the plan. Because we've been able to shorten that territory process a bit and make a more intelligent quota ramping calculation, quota management calculation through Anaplan, which we did also have to work through on some of those rules of when does it ramp, and what type of ramp, and things like that, that's been something that we were able to work through and really improve the end state of our quota reporting. 

 

Becca Buell 0:22:33.5 

In terms of outcomes, what are some of the prelim outcomes you're starting to see as you and your team and your business partners in sales in starting to use it? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:22:42.1 

It's a lot less painful. It's so much less painful. I was joking with Danny right before we walked in. We were talking about the time savings piece like, 'Oh, how much time do you think you've saved?' I was like, 'Oh, about 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. from October through December, just from me.' It really was that painful to manage something so manual and so tedious. Definitely a time saving for myself, definitely a time saving at the management level. It's given management the ability to jump into the system and really quickly see, 'Hey, we know that…' In the case of maybe Sweden, 'We've not probably moved everything out of rep A into rep B. We're not trying to change the world here. We really want to minimize breakage.' I want to see the things that have changed, and seeing the things that have changed, so much easier. It's a filter here, a filter there, and you have the data you're looking at, at your fingertips. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:23:47.7 

Additionally, I really am a huge fan of letting RVPs self-serve as much as possible. We were able to provide them in one tool with… I don't want to call it a source of truth, because really it pulls from our sources of truth. It's given them the information that they need to know at their fingertips. We're learning more through the process. We're currently live on the process right now so we'll wrap up in the next week or two and issue to reps in early January. There's things that we're learning like, 'Oh, we'd love to have this,' but truthfully this is the best set of data that we've ever been able to issue to RVPs and look to them and say, 'Hey, listen. I am not the person who knows Sweden. I do not know the industries, I do not know the big companies, and I don't know what areas your reps are strong in. Here, take this data. Take all the data that I have in one place where you're able to play with it and manipulate it, and you tell me what a good territory looks like. I'll work with you.' I'll make sure that from a leadership perspective, from an operational perspective, everything looks good, but let's put the decisions in the RVPs' hand and give them the best tools so that they can make, again, the best territories possible for their reps on day one. 

 

Becca Buell 0:25:01.3 

How do you think that's going to affect the business long-term? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:25:04.3 

Ultimately that, coupled with a few other nifty Power BI dashboards that I'm very thrilled about for this next year, I'm highly confident that the sellers are going to be able to step in on that first week in January and come forth actually having intelligent account planning, which I don't think we've ever had before. We've been giving them data, but ultimately it's not the data they need. They see their account list. they go, 'Hey, I thought I was getting this and not that. Where did this go?' We spend the month… Probably until mid-February we spend iterating and fixing the things we didn't mean to break. There will be now… I'm sure there'll be some things. Listen, it's sales! There is going to be so much less, because there's going to be so much less to clean up by function of the transparency that we've given the RVPs through the process. 

 

Becca Buell 0:26:01.6 

So am I hearing like a 30-to-45-day planning cut-down? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:26:04.6 

Yes, absolutely. Then even time on the back end, like once we've issued that time of, 'Oh, we didn't mean to do that. We didn't mean to do this. Two people got assigned in these Excel files. How do we fix it? We did the wrong file.' I'd say even there's probably two weeks on the back end after issuance that it's saving us of having to iterate through those changes. It's been awesome 

 

Becca Buell 0:26:29.0 

Danny, I'm curious. Based on what Valerie shared and what they're starting to see as they're actively planning, and also Valerie's actively supporting all of her RVPs this week so really excited that she was able to take time to talk with you all, but Danny, what would you recommend, or how are you thinking about advising Valerie and team on what's next with their model and their business process? 

 

Danny Lane 0:26:52.0 

Sure. Like I mentioned earlier, we did a great job during the implementation of separating the wants and the needs. We got, I think, a lot of those wants but not all of them, so I think next steps would be incorporating some of those desires, defining rules so that we can make that carving engine stronger and more efficient so that there's less end issuer interaction and they come into the tool closer to that end state that they need. The app put us in a position where we can easily add on new functionality as we decide we want to do it. I foresee some enhancements going down that road. There was functionality that simply, for change management purposes because of the tight deadline, we wanted to focus on our end goals here. We set those aside, but we can bring those back really rather efficiently. I think those are a few areas that I could see down the roadmap that Flexera would continue to see success and positive outcomes coming from the tool. 

 

Becca Buell 0:28:03.6 

Is there anything you're particularly excited about, Valerie, with what's to come either with Anaplan, with your business process, or how this is going to change? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:28:11.7 

Yes. We are still midst of territory planning right now, so I'm very curious to see in terms of the quota pieces and the quota reporting how that really integrates with our processes that we need to get to for 1 Jan and issuing new quotas. Honestly, I've received really positive feedback from our RVPs so far which really is quite incredible, because it's a new tool on a tight timeline. It's never fun to learn anything new, but they've really been quite positive on it. Once they've figured out how to navigate, how to get to what they want, they're able to really get up and running. I've had already people ask if they can use this for our in-year territory management tool. Right now it's not set up to do that. We don't have the integrations in Salesforce so it's not live data. I was like, 'Wow, this is great. They must actually be enjoying using this tool, or at least finding it easier than our current processes by a long shot.' 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:29:18.3 

Something I do actually see on the roadmap though is certainly more robust quota reporting, especially through the year. We did spend a lot of time working on the quota ramping and the role management, and how that all flows through. I think we'll be using that more robustly within a year of quota maintaining. Also, I do see us being able to enrich the reporting that we have right now on territory changes. It's actually not something that we've really looked at before is, 'If this is the territory we've issued you, how does that change through the year and why would those changes be happening?' In an ideal world there would be no changes, but it is far from perfect, is how it always seems to go. We've never been able to take a look back, and now we actually have the tools to take a look back and start understanding some of the shifts that we see in the seller landscape, territory landscape. Those are a few things that are on my brain that I think we'll really be able to dig into in the next six-to-nine months. 

 

Becca Buell 0:30:28.5 

Makes sense. That's something that, as I see others tackle this journey, getting the sellers' motivation reignited during the year as well, getting the analytics of, 'Okay, what is the attainment of the quota in the middle of the year? How am I doing? What deals could I potentially pull forward to make my number for the year, help the leadership team hit the larger number?' I think there's a lot to be unlocked there from integration, and one perspective here also of the group is, there's a few areas in terms of starting and the value of getting the model up before you have live integrations as well, but standing those up quickly shortly thereafter so your business partners, yourselves, can have self-service access to constantly make changes against that insight. I think it's definitely an area that would be high-value. 

 

Danny Lane 0:31:16.4 

Just to add to that too, one thing I think that we saw during the development of the tool was getting the tool in front of your face allowed us to understand not just what the business needed, but let's take this concept that's in the app that's already configurated. Let's enhance it to make it even more aligned to what your end-state goals are for your business process. Leverage what's already built, and then instead of starting from the ground up enrich it so that we could empower the business even more than what was there, or what the app even initially desired by getting us to that even higher end state. 

 

Becca Buell 0:32:01.9 

Awesome. That was all of my prepared questions. We've got about ten minutes or so, or a couple of minutes for Q&A from the audience. I would love to hear, and Racquel will be walking around with candy again if anybody has questions for Valerie or Danny on how they approached it or any other topics that you want to learn a bit more about. It looks like we have a mic rolling around. 

 

Audience 0:32:32.7 

Hi, I'm Jen from Databricks, Inc. We've also recently rolled out our T&Q not too long ago. We do have other models that we're trying to connect better with our T&Q, for example headcount model. Even if it doesn't live in Anaplan today, how do you currently connect your capacity plan and headcount plan back to your T&Q today? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:32:58.9 

Our capacity plan back to Anaplan? 

 

Becca Buell 0:33:00.0 

Yes, like the roster. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:33:01.7 

Yes. So we do load that in. We maintain, myself and another co-worker of mine, we maintain really that roster. I wish I could say that our Workday provided us better data. Unfortunately we've found, especially honestly with the merging of Snow into our dataset, that a lot of the especially employee history for a lot of those legacy Snow employees was lost that we needed to be able to really intelligently design a territory plan for them. It's something that we maintain in a spreadsheet and then we upload into the data hub. 

 

Becca Buell 0:33:45.9 

For a little bit of background, Jen, as well, when we stared these conversations and advisory discussions around what to tackle when, it was something that we were looking at accomplishing during this first project is blending in capacity, scoring, segmentation, all these really enriched, intelligent outputs that you want to inform the quota at the end of the day, because you want to include ramping productivity. Ultimately, we did an analysis of looking at the impact to the business, the number of people involved, the LOE, all the pieces that would add value, and we prioritized T&Q to start. I think it's something that we've been considering then in discussions around putting in Anaplan, so you get that visibility. What is the year-over-year change, or what are the changes not even year-over-year but within the same year of team make-ups? What's the ramp changes, position changes, right? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:34:44.1 

Yes, and I think the struggle for us also is a bit on timing. We finalize our quota allocation model almost before we even enter into T&Q. Just from a timing perspective alone it was, I just think, something that just wouldn't work with the timeline. I agree that it's something that would be an easy fit to enhancing in future years. 

 

Danny Lane 0:35:09.0 

Even so, the T&Q app does support some of those functionalities that I think we decided to put on hold just because of change management and timelines. We'll do a tutorial later and help get you ramped up, or help enable your team down the road. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:35:26.3 

Yes. Really, it also ties up with finance. The plan number for next year, how much quota, what are those people? There's that whole iterative process that also spans into functions that are just outside of sales ops. 

 

Becca Buell 0:35:43.0 

Thanks for the question. Any other questions? 

 

Audience 0:35:46.4 

Hi, my name is Steven. We are trying to implement something similar. My question is, on a day-to-day basis, does your RVPs go and do work in Anaplan on a day-to-day basis, or is it mostly your team? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:36:03.0 

So on a day-to-day basis, well, 1) we're open right now, and really for the RVPs their functionality, their user experience in Anaplan, is really going to be limited to two weeks. We'll keep the system open for them for two weeks. In that two weeks, my experience from everyone that's finalized thus far is it takes them two days, and that's a little bit of here, there, I log out, I take a meeting, I come back in and I finish up a few last things. To say it's a day-to-day even for the RVPs, I'd say, would be a lot, even for the two weeks that it's open. It's pretty low-touch. For me, yes, I'm in there all the time. I'm in there all the time. I'm pulling reporting. I'm checking. I'm making sure that… I'm analyzing the finished territories. I'm looking at the in-progress territories. I'm looking at the assigned, the unassigned, the quota roll-ups in the system. I'm in there a lot. The RVPs though, for the interaction that they have, I'd say a handful of days for the period that it's open. 

 

Audience 0:37:14.3 

So it's just during the quota-defining time that they probably have to interact with the tool. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:37:20.7 

Yes, and they'll be providing input then. 

 

Audience 0:37:23.3 

Okay. Okay. 

 

Becca Buell 0:37:24.1 

It sounds like, if I'm connecting the dots between your question and a comment you made earlier, Valerie, right now this is the volume that they're in because it's annual planning, but if there's automated integrations the folks that were asking for self-service access may be in a bit more frequently, right? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:37:40.0 

Oh, yes. 

 

Becca Buell 0:37:41.1 

They are the ones who are hands on in the tool right now. Does that answer your question, Steven? 

 

Audience 0:37:47.7 

Yes. Again, we are trying to build it ground-up where we're trying to give our underwriters… They define their numbers and then that rolls up to the RVP. The RVP doesn't decide it. That will come from down below and then roll up, but then when we try to count the number of people we need to give… You know, it's 200-plus. How do we give all those people access, and should we do it in Salesforce? That was the next question. 

 

Becca Buell 0:38:21.5 

Sure. Maybe this can help Steven, is how did you approach the rollout to enable the people that are in Anaplan today? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:38:30.1 

I guess, to take a step back, during our implementation we had a set of two weeks, I think, that we had testing. We had rolled out to an RVP in the Americas, one over in EMEA, and one on a separate business unit, and they were our champions. They had gone into this tool. They tested the functionality. They said, 'Okay, if I do this, if I take this action, click this button, do the filter here, I understand how this works. I have signed off and I approve. This is what I need. This is what I need to get territory planning done.' Then, fast-forward three or four weeks, we're rolling it out to all of the RVPs. We're able to have that champion in the room. We're able to point to the RVP, their peer, and say, 'This person has tested it. They've seen it a month longer than you and they're a great resource.' Obviously, in operations we're also a great resource. Sometimes it's easier to reach out to that peer, so I think that was a really great idea, having the RVPs test. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:39:34.7 

Then, when it actually came to the rollout, Danny actually made a really helpful mini-video, a little bite-sized ten-minute, 'Here's everything you need to know how to do.' I walked through a live training session. We recorded that training session. I made a PDF with arrows and pointers, and the good thing is that tool is so simple that that is really all you need to know to get through. An arrow here and a comment box and really you can get up and running in probably 15 minutes if you took a look through it and figured it out. It's just like any functionality you would see in the Excel sheet that we're used to. You filter, you sort, you search. It's not rocket science. That was how we did the rollout. We also had office hours. We ended up doing office hours. After we rolled out and during the open season we had 30 minutes every day where they don't have to come. They can come. I'll be sitting on that call regardless. That was also really helpful because some people, maybe the email went to their spam folder or they couldn't find whatever, X, Y, Z, so it was just easy. Five minutes, fix their problems. 

 

Becca Buell 0:40:48.4 

Do we have time for one or two more questions? Great. Okay. 

 

Audience 0:40:56.6 

[Unclear phrase 0:40:56.6]. 

 

Danny Lane 0:41:10.9 

Yes. So really you can rerun the configurator as many times as you want. Through our exercise, we did it twice. What we did is we took a first draft and got their data, put it through the configurator and saw what the configurator spat out. That gave us that initial first picture to start having those conversations of, 'Does this look right? Do we have key datapoints that we'd like? Where do we envision that we can find more value out of the tool? Does the app support that?' That gave us that first draft so that we could go back and do a second round of pushing the configurator. That got us closer to our end goal, and then from there we did some final polishing after that. 

 

Becca Buell 0:42:01.2 

Valerie, when we were catching up earlier, she was also sharing about the scenarios and flexibility as an end user, not just configurating it. Do you want to speak to one of those scenarios you had to run into recently? 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:42:11.1 

Yes. We changed our go-to-market strategy in North American in between building the app and then going live with the app, so it was a completely different hierarchy, people in different places, different leaders, and I have the ability really easily to… Well, obviously, 1) to do the territory planning, but 2) an unexpected benefit was that I can almost scenario plan a little bit. I probably shouldn't be using it this way, and there's probably an easier way to do it if we were to spend the time and build it out this way, but I'm able to say, 'Okay, if I moved seller A from this team to this team what breakage do I have? Where does this cause problems? How do I think about this before I even open it to the RVPs?' It's actually been really, really helpful, and Danny's been a godsend. I'll call him and I'll say, 'Hey, actually I was thinking I need this,' and we're able to get on the phone with him and work through that really quickly. It's been just amazingly flexible for the volume of change that we've had to incorporate just with the acquisition, but then also a new shift in the strategy. It's been easy to accomplish. 

 

Becca Buell 0:43:20.9 

Right. I think we're just about at time unless there's any final questions. Oh, looks like we've got one more. 

 

Audience 0:43:28.3 

[Unclear phrase 0:43:28.3]. What does your team make-up look like? Did you have to hire full-time model builders or are you relying on your partnerships here? [Unclear phrase 0:43:35.3]. 

 

Danny Lane 0:43:38.7 

Great question. From our end, we've got a really refined team. It was myself, two model builders, and a project manager and then an engagement lead. That was the team. From your end too it was pretty trimmed down. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:43:54.9 

Yes. It was primarily me. I'd say I was the lead, and then my co-worker Larry from the data side pulling together everything I needed. We have not had to hire any additional resources, and if anything compared to last year and July's process for territory planning we've definitely saved time, even just between the two of us. There is a really nifty model building course in Anaplan. If I had completed it… I had some mid-territory so I'm a little lagging on that one, but I think I got almost halfway through and even I'm able to go into the model to add things, to add functionality, find things, find functionality. Future state in terms of model maintenance, there's going to be a lot that we can self-serve on. Right now, since we have ours with Danny, I'm relying on Danny to get me through this, but I have zero concerns that on a go-forward basis for the model maintenance I won't be able to do that. 

 

Danny Lane 0:45:02.0 

To that point too, the app sets you up for sustainable success down the road after you implement it. From ma technical aspect it puts you in a position to be able to make easy enhancements quickly, and I think that junior model builders who are learning can find a very easy onboarding process with the tool to be able to not run themselves into a problem where they're just hitting blockers because they can't get formulas to work and they can't get logic to pull from one place to another. It really does set the stage for a bright future there. 

 

Valerie Roberson 0:45:37.8 

I think the most challenging part, just a last little comment, the most challenging part honestly was just the implementation. We did it so fast that it really was a lot of time and energy from my team's part to do that as well as keeping the rest of the regular operations cadence going. I'd say if anything the implementation was a stretch of, 'Just get through it,' but the ongoing part, there is no need for additional resources from my perspective. 

 

Becca Buell 0:46:08.3 

Amazing. Well, really appreciate Valerie and Danny taking the time to share your story, the Q&A from the audience to learn a bit more about how it fits in with the processes that are in flight or being evaluated. We're going to be around this afternoon or at the reception if you'd like to learn more. Definitely stop by, and thanks again. Appreciate it, guys. 

 

Danny Lane 0:46:29.8 

Thank you.