HP shifts from Excel speadsheets to Anaplan to improve sales performance

HP previously used a disparate combination of Excel, Access and analytics tools before adopting Anaplan's HyperBlock technology

HP has shifted away from using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and various other disparate software tools for its territory and quota-planning processes because, it claims, it was over-complicated and inefficient. The Palo Alto, California-based company has instead selected cloud-based business planning and forecasting tools from Anaplan.

According to Yves Cabanac, head of the new HPInc sales compensation team, HP has 25,000 sales people, who receive an annual letter detailing their individual sales targets. Cabanac explained that the letter is a critical part of the sales cycle.

"If you do a bad job [in managing the quota] then it can have a direct impact on your revenue, margins and overall strategy; so it is really about doing the right job, and taking into account the whole market so you know what is going on from a currency perspective among other things," he said.

He said compiling all that data for 25,000 sales staff located around the world so that it can be sent out in the annual letter in one batch was a big challenge. "It means crunching a lot of resources and it is usually at a bad time because it is during Q4, which is the time when you really have to be focusing on sales," he stated.

Previously, the company used a combination of Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft Access database, analytics tools and more. Cabanac said that the list was exhaustive, and involved complex algorithms and computing.

As there tended to be minor inaccuracies along the way, this only added to the time it took to complete the process as people corrected these manually. HP wanted to change the way it worked and so it looked at three options.

"The first option was to use Excel on the front-end, with a back-end developed by us, but performance-wise it didn't work. The second would have been to customise it ourselves, but that would have taken us ages. The final option was to look at the market and see what products were out there," Cabanac said.

He suggested that when HP looked for a solution at the end of 2012, there was nothing on the market that stood out.

"We wanted to impact 25,000 sales reps in 128 countries. We wanted a process that could [take over] from Excel spreadsheets and the software tools [that we were currently using] in order to do a big bang [approach], because we wouldn't have time to do this engineering ourselves over four years," he said.

The team at HP met up with Anaplan's CEO Fred Laluyaux and decided to give Anaplan's HyperBlock technology a trial.

"We said we'll bet on Anaplan for our tool and customise it to ensure that it really can act as our quota-deployment tool, so that it can streamline our processes from the financial perspective all the way to the letter that the sales rep receives for his or her objectives," Cabanac said.

The solution worked as HP wanted it to, and it was implemented within eight months.

HP saw some of the benefits soon after, as the time it took for the sales letter to be prepared and given to the sales representatives reduced significantly. This enabled sales reps to get to work more quickly towards hitting their targets. In turn, HP believes that Anaplan has enabled it to improve its overall sales performance.

Cabanac added that the fact Anaplan is a start-up was a positive for HP. "It is a small company but this was a benefit because they were focused on HP. They have worked with other big companies too, but we were their really big customer," he said.