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What do Gartner, Forrester, and IDC have in common? They all named Anaplan a planning leader.
StepStone improves sales forecasting, target setting, and territory alignment
StepStone, a digital job board provider used by 60,000 companies in 20 countries, needed to move beyond spreadsheets for sales planning. Data volume, data security, and collaboration were big issues that their old process couldn’t address. After a rapid initial build, they were able to track sales reps’ targets, territories, and performance in one place. Soon they added competitive intelligence to determine granular market potential. Quarterly reforecasting and more-accurate targets have further improved efficiency and performance.
Wherever you use Excel templates in the business today, why not use Anaplan?Jan Heiremans
Challenge
Before Anaplan, StepStone relied on Excel spreadsheets for all of its sales planning. Because StepStone’s sales planning process involves market data across 400,000+ companies per country, Excel became too big to manage with a manual process. Additionally, there were concerns around emailing sensitive data to hundreds of employees, such as salaries and customer lists.
Solution
StepStone wasn’t actively looking for a solution when they saw a demo of Anaplan at an industry event. But after seeing the product in action, it was love at first sight. StepStone found the implementation process to be quick and efficient with little ramp-up required for its spreadsheet-savvy team. Impressively, the Anaplan team was able to build the first model in just two weeks.
Results
With Anaplan, StepStone replaced countless spreadsheets with a single planning platform and now has a consolidated and consistent bottom-up input into the sales plan. The team has improved the accuracy of its sales targets, and data can now be shared more easily. By moving sales planning to the cloud, teams can now collaborate more efficiently and everyone sees the same set of data, eliminating version control issues. Now, StepStone’s COO sees a future where Excel isn’t needed.
Why Anaplan
After seeing a demo, StepStone saw the value that the Anaplan platform could bring to the organization and knew that not only would implementation be quick, but so would training and adoption. When it came time for the proof of concept, Anaplan was able to build a model of their disparate spreadsheets in just a matter of days, exciting the team for the future.
My name is Kevin Cerutti. I am the Senior Finance Director for ForeScout Technologies.
Initial planning process prior to Anaplan was all Excel based. We have multiple entities; multiple currencies, and obviously added a lot of complexities trying to manage that all in Excel is limited number of users that can provide.
Like so many companies, our plan was all in Excel, financial planning forecasting, budgeting is done in Excel. We also did all of our quota management and commission payments in Excel as well.
On the commission side, we had issues where we were finding where employees’ commission’s calculations were incorrect. And sometimes we weren’t finding these for three or four quarters after. So, obviously you are going in, and you are changing the data. You are having to modify formulas based on new requirements for the commission plans, and without really managing that closely, and with the complexity of so many employees, it was difficult and it did cause a lot of errors and problems.
On the financial planning side, we were just a pretty young company on the financial planning. So, our models were pretty basic. And we had difficulty trying to expand that to our multiple entities, multiple currency situations that we had as we were growing.
You know, we were looking for two different types of solutions. So, one was for financial planning and at the same time we have the need to try to find something to deal with our commission and quota planning.
But after being introduced to Anaplan, and really been able to see the flexibility of the product, it was actually a pretty easy decision to move forward with Anaplan, knowing that we would be able to do both of those needs, to satisfy both of those needs with a single product.
We actually started with the commission component first. And I think we started design in July and we implemented it in August. So, it took about a month to do that initial design.
Once you roll it out, then you come up with new ideas, new approaches, obviously commissions, things change all the time. So, the flexibility to continue to modify and update and improve the reporting, the information was great. So, and then we went down the road of the financial planning, and that took about three months to implement.
The data is immediate, it’s available real-time. Our sales teams have the ability to go on a daily basis and see where they at on there, you know, commissions for the month, from a financial it’s easier to do scenarios. We do long-term planning as well as bottoms-up short-term detail budgeting. So, it’s easier to run long-term scenarios just using financial metrics and drivers.
It’s much, much more dynamic and inclusive.
So, we really utilize the HUB concept. So, most of our data goes into a single repository, you know, an entity or model. And then from now we are able to feed all of the other models.
We had a big issue with commissions being incorrectly calculated. And, so, that was a big red flag for us, and we had some real issues with that. So, just the simple return on that of having a system that is much, much more accurate that easy for sales reps to review their own data, more timely. Just that benefit alone, you know, almost makes it worth it. From an intrinsic value, it’s definitely had a great return.
Well our ability to manage real-time to run scenarios, you can go to a meeting and, you know, sit with the CFO or CEO and they can talk about, you know, “what if we do this?”, “what if we do that?” Being able to run those scenarios real-time, is much different than getting the information, taking a note, walking out of the meeting, coming back a week later and presenting the data. So, having the real-time ability has — it’s probably been the biggest value.
One thing we are not doing yet is full quota management and quota territory assignments. So, that’s one of the next big steps I’d like to take.
My name is Kevin Cerutti. I am Senior Director of Finance for ForeScout Technologies, and we use Anaplan for sales planning, commissions, budgeting and forecasting.