Kicking off our planning process in 2018 took a month of work to build an Excel model. This year we walked into the kick-off meeting with a model that was already up and running.
Senior Manager, Sales Planning and Analytics
Goodbye manual tasks. Hello strategy.
Excel is a great tool, but it does have its drawbacks. The disconnected and manual nature of spreadsheets makes them prone to error and forces teams to waste countless cycles validating data. That was the case with Acquia, before it turned to Workday Adaptive Planning. Now, the sales operations team can focus more on the inputs and less on the mechanics of the model, improving the team’s confidence in formulas and data accuracy and giving FP&A staff the ability to plan on the fly.
Challenges.
Lack of version control meant that work was inadvertently overwritten on a regular basis
Sales operations struggled to create what-if scenarios when making changes in ramp speed, headcount, geography, and attrition variables during meetings with leadership
Manual spreadsheets forced the team to spend its time validating formulas instead of analyzing business decisions
Results.
Sales operations can now quickly and easily analyze and report on business outcomes based on varied headcount, ramp speed, quota, and top-down target bookings assumptions
Version control allows team to make changes to the model without losing previous work, and makes it easy to highlight planning versus actuals variances and explain the gap
Gained ability to conduct what-if scenario analysis in real time during presentations