Podcasts about Anaplan

In this episode of the Knowledge Base Ninjas podcast, we speak with Paul Taylor, Technical Content Manager at Anaplan. Paul shares his non-traditional path from journalism and corporate communications into technical writing. Paul discusses how his varied background influenced his strategic mindset for documentation, highlighting that good content begins with the user. He advises on creating a technical writing team from scratch, the need to balance junior and senior talent, and why integrating with company culture is essential. Paul also talks about the changing role of documentation in business and how AI can be used as a facilitator and not a destroyer. His view on documentation is clear: it's not just a requirement, but a critical tool for enabling users and reducing support load. He shares more on content clarity, team collaboration, and smarter working with AI. Catch the full conversation on the Knowledge Base Ninjas podcast for valuable takeaways and pro tips. Stay tuned for expert insights and actionable strategies you don't want to miss out on.

Building credibility is a hot topic that has become vital for executives and professionals in today's fast-paced workplace. However, many leaders struggle to earn lasting trust and influence. Are you consistently seen as someone who delivers on promises and inspires confidence?In this episode, you will learn the core principles of building credibility at work. Our host and CEO Porschia, alongside our guest Victor Barnes, will share real-world insights from his 35-year global leadership journey at Coca-Cola, Anaplan, and beyond.They will also discuss how to develop an executive presence that combines authenticity, competence, and consistency. So you can stand out and lead effectively! You'll hear practical formulas and stories to help you understand where credibility really comes from, plus tips on navigating “managing up” without sacrificing your integrity.Click here for full show notes and to learn more:  https://www.fly-highcoaching.com/building-credibilityCheck out the free master class Career 911: Solving the Top 5 Challenges Executives and Professionals Have: https://fly-high-coaching.thinkific.com/courses/Career%20911%20Master%20Class!

In this episode of CPM Customer Success, host Andy Sana welcomes back Dave Collins, Director of Solutions Consulting at OneStream Software, for a deep-dive discussion into one of the most common comparisons finance teams are making today: OneStream vs. Anaplan. Dave breaks down the core differences between modular “connected planning” tools like Anaplan and OneStream's unified, extensible CPM platform. They explore: • The scalability limitations of cube-based models • How OneStream eliminates technical debt through unification • Real-world examples of organizations transitioning from Anaplan to OneStream • Integration and data quality strategies that actually work • Why AI, automation, and built-in financial intelligence are reshaping performance management Whether you're an FP&A leader, IT stakeholder, or evaluating CPM solutions across your organization, this episode offers strategic insight to help you make a smarter, future-ready decision.

Data is great, but understanding how to use the data is even more important. Dana Therrien, Vice President & CRO Practice at Anaplan, joins Alastair and Howard this week to talk about how actioning your data can make you a better runner as well as a better sales professional. Follow the Host on LinkedIn: Howard Brown (CEO, Revenue.io) And our Special Guest: Dana Therrien (Vice President, Chief Revenue Officer Practice, Anaplan) Sponsored by: Revenue.io | Powering high-performing revenue teams with real-time guidance Explore the Revenue.io Podcast Universe: Sales Enablement Podcast Selling with Purpose Podcast RevOps Podcast

In this episode of Careers in Finance on FinPod, we sit down with Iain Main, who has built a career working across global markets. Iain began his journey at BDO, where he trained as a Chartered Accountant and gained valuable experience in London and Vancouver. His career later took him to Omnicom, where he worked in FP&A, partnering with CFOs and CEOs across 25 countries, gaining deep insights into financial planning and business operations. Now a consultant at Bedford Consulting, Iain specializes in implementing and optimizing Anaplan, helping businesses scale their financial planning strategies. In the episode, Iain shares key lessons from his diverse roles, the trends shaping FP&A today, and the importance of scenario planning and collaboration across organizations. This episode is packed with actionable insights for finance professionals looking to navigate the evolving financial planning landscape.

Send us a Text Message.While Anaplan may have coined the term "Connected Planning," many businesses still grapple with identifying the appropriate interconnected elements. Supply Chain suites opt for a unique strategy, integrating planning with network and retail-focused execution components like WMS, TMS, and OMS. ERP suites, conversely, take a different route, encompassing FP&A alongside S&OP capabilities. Despite dedicated planning platforms addressing specific planning functions, they often lack comprehensive coverage of essential aspects, leading to data silos that hinder end-to-end planning traceability unless all planning data resides in a single system. Thus, the question arises: Where do Anaplan's capabilities stand, and how do they measure up against other planning suites?In today's episode, we invited a panel of industry experts for a live discussion on LinkedIn to conduct an independent review of Anaplan's capabilities. We covered many grounds, including where Anaplan might be a fit in the enterprise architecture and where it might be overused. Finally, they analyze many data points to help understand Anaplan's core strengths and weaknesses.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs. rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform. 

Welcome to Episode #20 of the CPM Customer Success podcast! Continuing our series on OneStream's unique differentiators, this episode delves into the critical topic of Financial Data Quality. Building on our previous Episode #18 discussion about Extensible Dimensionality, we explore how OneStream's foundation in data quality has evolved into a powerful engine that sets it apart from competitors.  Join us as we uncover the history and evolution of OneStream's Financial Data Quality. Learn about the comprehensive capabilities of OneStream's Financial Data Quality engine, including seamless data integration from multiple sources, automated data loading, and robust auditing features.  We'll discuss why financial data quality is essential for your business, highlighting its impact on reporting accuracy, risk mitigation, efficiency, and decision-making confidence. Hear real-world success stories and see how OneStream outperforms competitors like Hyperion, Anaplan, Tagetik, and Workday.  Whether you're already a OneStream user or exploring corporate performance management solutions, this episode offers valuable insights into mastering financial data quality. Discover how OneStream can transform your financial processes, providing you with the confidence and clarity needed to drive performance and lead at speed.  Tune in now to gain a deeper understanding of OneStream's Financial Data Quality and its role in ensuring your data is accurate, reliable, and ready to support your business decisions. 

Jason Lemkin is one of the OG SaaS investors with all of his first five investments turning into unicorns with Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, Salesloft and RevenueCat all in his portfolio. SaaStr is the largest global community in SaaS and he has taught a generation the fundamentals of SaaS on saastr.com. In Our First Ever Episode of This Week in SaaS 1. PluralSight Goes to Zero: WTF happened to PluralSight? How did it go from $3.5BN to $0? Will this have a wider impact on the willingness of PE to buy tech companies? Who are the next contenders to go from hero to zero? Zendesk? Anaplan? Will this generation of PE funds be let off by their LPs for a poor vintage? 2. Salesforce's Worst Stock Market Drop Since 2004 + Mongo Takes a 23% Hit: Why did Salesforce lose $50BN of market cap in a single day? Is the same true for MongoDB taking a 23% hit in one day? What does it mean when the new normal is these once hyper-growth companies now growing only 6% per annum? 3. The Settlers into Slow Growth: Why does Jason believe that Dropbox and Box have both settled into a world of slow growth? What happens to Twilio from here in a world post Jeff Lawson? What happens to Retool from this point on? Would Jason be a buyer of Notion at $10BN? 4. Venture Capital is Broken: Why does Jason believe that we need to see a relation of public multiples for the math in venture capital to work again? Why does Jason believe that the way we mark portfolios with TVPI leads to corrupt and bad behaviour? How does Jason think we will solve the problem of liquidity with IPOs being shut, M&A being out of the window and now PE being a doubt as the source of buyers?

Jason Lemkin is one of the OG SaaS investors with all of his first five investments turning into unicorns with Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, Salesloft and RevenueCat all in his portfolio. SaaStr is the largest global community in SaaS and he has taught a generation the fundamentals of SaaS on saastr.com. In Today's Episode with Jason Lemkin We Discuss: 1. Growth Rates and Churn Rates: Average/Good/Great: What is a growth rate that would excite Jason in a SaaS company? What is average? What levels of churn would worry Jason to see? What would excite him to see? What does Jason never tolerate when it comes to either growth rate or retention? 2. What Founder Combination Always Wins: Why does Jason believe you cannot lose money on a CEO salesperson and a technical CTO founding partnership? Why does Jason always meet the CTO for a second meeting in the diligence process? What questions does he ask? What do the best CTOs do or say? Why does Jason always want to sell his shares when the founders want to sell? Why does Jason believe that a company is never the same when the founders leave? 3. WTF is Happening in the World of VC: Why does Jason believe that pricing is worse than it has ever been in venture? Why does Jason believe that traditional seed VC is systemically broken? Why are companies getting stuffed with more cash than ever before? What does Jason know now about dilution that he wishes he had known when he started? Why does Jason believe that you should always recycle everything? 4. WTF is Happening in PE and Later Stage Markets: What happens to all the overpriced acquisitions like Zendesk and Salesloft where private equity way overpaid for them, they have no growth and no product innovation? What happens to the generation of public companies like Box, Dropbox and Twilio, all with low growth and little product innovation in the single-digit market caps? Why does Jason believe that Klaviyo is the most undervalued public company today? What does Jason believe will happen to Anaplan with Pigment eating their lunch?

In a special episode of Behind the Deal live from Thoma Bravo's Annual Meeting in March 2024, Managing Partner Seth Boro welcomes Sumit Dhawan, CEO at Proofpoint, Mike Capone, CEO at Qlik, and Charlie Gottdiener, CEO at Anaplan, to the stage to discuss how their companies are leveraging the power of artificial intelligence. The CEOs share perspectives on generative AI and its impact on cybersecurity, what AI means for the future of IP and how businesses can channel AI into actionable solutions for their customers. For more information on Thoma Bravo's Behind the Deal, visit https://www.thomabravo.com/behindthedeal Learn more about Thoma Bravo: https://www.thomabravo.com/ Learn more about Proofpoint: https://www.proofpoint.com/us Learn more about Qlik: https://www.qlik.com/us Learn more about Anaplan: https://www.anaplan.com/

"Culture" is a difficult word for many leaders. It's either the fuel that's driving your growth or it's the weight that's holding you back. How do you wrangle this wild card to work for you, not against you? Today, we talk with Jim Rich, Chief Revenue Officer for Vbrick Systems. In this episode, we will talk about several topics, including changes in the sales environment, culture shifts in organizations, and a unique technology that streamlines communication between senior leadership and their troops.  Jim Rich has over 25 years of sales leadership experience in the software industry, with expertise in digital transformation and business intelligence. He has served in key sales and revenue marketing positions at Sisense, Anaplan, and Salesforce where he was the first commercial sales leader in the New York office, growing that team exponentially over seven years.  After listening to today's episode, check out the list of services offered by Vbrick to see how they can help you integrate video into your daily operations. 

In this episode of the CRO Spotlight podcast, host Warren Zenna dives into the critical role of Chief Revenue Officers (CROs) with special guest Dana Therrien, Head of Revenue Operations for Anaplan.Warren and Dana explore the challenges faced by CROs when organizations fail to fully understand or support their roles. They discuss the importance of strategic alignment, resource allocation, and the evolution of revenue operations (rev ops) in empowering CROs to drive organizational success.From navigating unrealistic goals to advocating for greater autonomy, Warren and Dana offer practical insights for CROs, sales and marketing leaders, and founders looking to optimize their revenue strategies.Join them as they shed light on the dynamic landscape of revenue leadership and provide actionable strategies for achieving peak performance in the CRO role.

Tom Dudack joins Chad Pyke on The EPM Show to share his insights on what it takes to be successful in the EPM space. Tom is a Senior Principal Customer Success Business Partner and FSI & BS Industry Captain at Anaplan. He has over 20 years of EPM experience and is an expert when it comes to helping organizations maximize their Anaplan investment. Tune into this episode to learn: → What the ideal environment for an Anaplan transformation looks like.  → How executive leadership can make or break the transformation.  → Why every customer needs to do an honest self-assessment of their readiness. → How the best customers approach the talent piece of the Anaplan transformation equation.  → Why it's critical to celebrate big wins well.  Visit all the pertinent links: cothryve.co/links 

Sukumar Ramanathan has over 20 years of technology sales experience and is currently an RVP of Sales at Anaplan overseeing the west region. He and his team specifically support some of the world's leading technology, media, and telecom companies. He joins Chad Pyke on the show to talk about his career journey. In this episode you'll learn:  → The importance of repetition as a key for long term career success. → Great leaders are great listeners. When in doubt, ask others “Tell me more”.  →  Finding a mentor you want to emulate will accelerate your career.  → How to build great relationships with your stakeholders.  Visit all the pertinent links: cothryve.co/links 

Brett has built a successful career in FP&A and the Anaplan ecosystem. He currently serves as a manager at Cervello and is a Certified Master Anaplanner. He joined Chad Pyke on The EPM Show today to talk about how he approaches building great solutions in Anaplan for clients. Tune into this episode to learn:  → How to build a great foundation for a customer in Anaplan.  → What it means to do the right thing for a client even when no one is looking. → How great consultants elevate their career by making themselves replaceable. → Why being too agile early on is bad for finance transformation work.  Visit all the pertinent links: cothryve.co/links

Meredith is the Senior Managing Director of FP&A at Markel, a specialty insurance company. She has 20 years of experience across FP&A and business analytics and currently oversees the Anaplan COE at Markel. She joins Chad Pyke today to talk about Markel's journey with Anaplan. In this episode you'll learn:  → Why executive buy-in is critical to a successful Anaplan implementation.  → How Markel's commitment to Anaplan has benefited their FP&A team. → Why integrating accountability cycles improves the planning process.  → How Markel has structured their COE and why they committed a COE from the beginning.  Visit all the pertinent links: cothryve.co/links

In this episode, David Madden, the Regional Vice President at Anaplan, shares his life journey, growing up on the "wrong side of the tracks" in Duxbury. Raised by a determined mother who ensured her three kids had everything they needed, David excelled in high school, outsmarting his own algebra teacher. His passion for wrestling led him to become a team captain during his four years in the sport. After high school, David attended Union College, where he initially pursued mechanical engineering but later switched to industrial engineering. Post-college, David embarked on a career as a business analyst and, eventually, took on the role of opening a UK branch for Softscape in London, covering all of Europe. His European experience included a unique stint at NATO headquarters, complete with his very own bodyguard. But this podcast is not just about professional triumphs – it's a journey intertwined with personal connections. Discover the heartwarming tale of David's international love story with Kate, who fearlessly joined him on the London escapade. Return with them to the States, where they settled in Southie before the allure of more space led them to Hingham, the current backdrop for their bustling family life with three children. Get ready for a dose of humor and heart as the episode discusses the Yankees, the concept of winning, Paul Newman, and lots of laughs. This podcast is more than just a story – it's a captivating blend of triumphs, love, and laughter that will leave you both inspired and entertained.

Kevin Moreno is the Anaplan Lead at Navan, a software development company in the travel industry. Prior to leading Anaplan at Navan, Kevin had a successful career as a consultant at both EY and Spaulding Ridge. He joins Chad Pyke today to share his insights on what it takes to succeed in the Anaplan ecosystem. In this episode you will learn:→ How leading with context can help you make a massive impact on the business. → The importance of EQ as a servant leader. → How Kevin built a successful career by focusing on mastery and relationship building. → Why finance transformation is never a straight line. Visit all the pertinent links: cothryve.co/links 

Joe van Bolderen is a career consultant and recently made the jump to start his own Anaplan implementation firm called VBCG, He joins Chad Pyke on the show today to talk about his journey and what he's learned along the way. In this episode you will learn:  → How to set yourself up for success by aligning expectations with leadership.  → Joe's new AI Anaplan assistant, Ana and how it can help you get the most out of Anaplan.  → Why great consultants know how to push back in a productive way. → Why career success is a product of continuous improvement.  → Why simplifying everything in your approach and communication is a worthy goal. Visit all the pertinent links: cothryve.co/links

Nick Bermudez is the Anaplan Practice Lead at Embark Consulting. He spent time at a myriad of consulting firms in the Anaplan ecosystem before moving over to Embark to start their Anaplan practice. He joins Chad Pyke on The EPM Show today to share his journey from starting out as an SAP consultant to becoming a Master Anaplanner and Practice Lead. In this episode you will learn:  → What separates an established Solution Architect from a Certified Master Anaplanner.  → His approach to building a new Anaplan practice at Embark.  → The unique approach to finance transformation with mid-enterprise clients.  → Building a great career in EPM starts with curiosity and learn by doing.  Visit all the pertinent links: cothryve.co/links

Are on-premises systems and/or legacy EPM's like Oracle, SAP, Anaplan, Hyperion holding you back from modernizing the office of finance? Hear from Naveed Salman, Managing Director, on why it may be time for a cloud-based software migration, and how OneStream's corporate performance management platform paired with Whitley Penn's Data Analytics & Transformation Solutions can help. Tune in to learn more and click here to register for our webinar on December 12, 2023. 

Robert Odonohue is the co-lead of the Anaplan COE at LinkedIn. He has been in the Anaplan ecosystem for 10 years having spent time as a consultant, inhouse at Anaplan, and leading COEs at top customers. In this episode you will learn:  → Core tenants for effective COE leadership. → How LinkedIn's Anaplan COE is improving their project management approach. → How to make great decisions with incomplete facts in a very dynamic business environment. → The differences in stakeholder management as an external consultant vs internal SME.  → What early career EPM professionals can do to accelerate their growth. Visit all the pertinent links: cothryve.co/links

Steven Barry is the Director of Delivery at Cervello. He's spent over a decade in the Anaplan ecosystem and has a tangible passion for helping EPM professionals advance their career. He joins Chad Pyke on The EPM Show to talk about failing upwards in your career.  In this episode you'll learn:  → The importance of authenticity and self-awareness in maximizing your career potential.  → Why saying “No” is often the path to success.  → How to define success and failure based on your personal core values.  → Why respectfully disagreeing with leadership can be a career accelerator.  → How to take smart career risks. Visit all the pertinent links: cothryve.co/links

Sean Brophy is the Head of Global Sales at Pigment. He's a proven sales executive having lead high-performing teams at Tableau, Alteryx, and Mapbox. He joins Chad Pyke on The EPM Show to share his take on the EPM industry and how to build an impactful career. In this episode you'll learn:  → The 5 “Ins” for impactful leadership. → Why knowing thyself is essential for making the most out of your career.  → How he evaluates taking smart career risks having spent most of his time at startups. → What he's most excited about when it comes to Pigment's journey and product.  Visit all the pertinent links + find out how much Anaplan professionals are getting paid ($$$): cothryve.co/links

Frank Calderoni, CEO of Velocity Global Frank has been an executive at some of the most high-profile tech companies in the world, including IBM, SanDisk, QLogic, Cisco, Red Hat, Anaplan and Velocity Global. We get the inside track into his career progression, starting from IBM and its legendary internship and leadership development programs. He shares why he decided to go into tech instead of working at one of the Big Four accounting firms and what it was like working all around the world. Frank then gives us a good look into what it's like being a c-suite executive, CEO and board member of some public companies. We explore whether the adage "it's lonely at the top" rings true, which promotions were most challenging to earn in his career, and the most valuable skills he credits to his success today. You don't want to miss Frank's master class on c-suite roles, people management and leadership development. http://blindap.onelink.me/ttCg/9emoyqui

In this episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Steven Birdsall, a 3X CRO and 4X COO, of both private and public companies. Together, we explore pivotal nuances between private and public companies, with a focus on the challenges and opportunities of going public as well as the strategies for optimizing go-to-market approaches, including insights on maintaining focus, achieving margin expansion, and the significance of the "rule of 50" in creating value. So much so that like mentioned in the outro, I had to seperate this epic episode into 2 parts. Stay tuned for part 2. Steven Birdsalls Linkedin Profile Laying the Proper Foundation for Going Public [00:01:12] Discussion on the importance of laying a strong foundation for a company before going public. Difference Between Board Expectations in Private and Public Companies [00:01:41] Exploration of the contrasting expectations from boards in private and public companies. Experience with Taking a Company Public [00:07:58] Stephen Birdsall shares his experience of taking Anaplan public in 2018 and discusses the different scenarios he has encountered in his career regarding IPOs. The significance of changing the go-to-market model [00:11:27] Stephen Birdsall discusses the importance of changing the go-to-market model when preparing for an IPO and the challenges faced in the planning software market. Creating a pod-based go-to-market strategy [00:14:20] Birdsall explains the concept of a pod-based go-to-market strategy, focusing on the benefits of streamlining different functions and creating accountability at a TAM (Total Addressable Market) level. Building scale through industry-level TAMs [00:17:08] Birdsall talks about the next step in scaling the business by creating industry-level TAMs and how it leads to a more efficient go-to-market strategy centered around specific industries. Focus on Industry and Geography [00:18:00] Companies under $100 million should focus on a specific industry or geography to maximize their opportunities and scale. Traditional Go-to-Market vs Pods [00:19:00] Sub $100 million companies selling to specific personas, such as CFOs, should focus on traditional go-to-market strategies instead of implementing pods. Private Equity Rule of 50 [00:23:34] Private equity-backed companies aim to achieve the Rule of 50, balancing growth and margin expansion to ensure profitable growth in the business. Solving Math Equations [00:27:15] Explanation of how to solve math equations by separating known and unknown variables and the importance of setting up the problem correctly. Different Approaches to Learning Math [00:28:10] Discussion about how kids learn math differently today and the importance of coming to the same solution regardless of the approach. Growth at All Costs Mentality [00:30:28] Exploration of the concept of growing at all costs and the potential consequences of disrupting the rule of 50 in terms of profitability and workforce. Private Equity's Value Creation Mode [00:36:43] Private equity firms aim to create value by acquiring rule of 50 companies and unlocking their potential. The Importance of Rule of 50 [00:37:40] Having a plan to reach rule of 50 is essential for creating value and attracting investors in a company.

Sourjya Rudra is an Anaplan Solution Architect and co-founder of PlanFlamingo Consulting. He's been in the Anaplan ecosystem for the better part of a decade working for multiple Anaplan Global Strategic Partners before starting his own firm. In this episode you'll learn: → How a non-traditional background can be a secret weapon in consulting. → What it's like to make the entrepreneurial leap in the Anaplan ecosystem. → How professional development changes when you're independent. → An inside look into the independent consultant network and why it's a great place to be. Visit all the pertinent links: cothryve.co/links

Matthew Dickerson leads the Anaplan COE at Jaguar Land Rover, one of the premier brands in the automotive industry. He spoke at the Anaplan Connect in the UK this year and joined Chad Pyke on The EPM Show to share some of the highlights from that event and how he's leading the COE at JLR through a critical season in the automotive industry. In this episode you'll learn: → The Anaplan COE's role in helping JLR shift from being demand led to supply led due to the global semiconductor shortage. → Why knowing your industry is just as important as knowing Anaplan in a customer role. → The keys to success in JLR's Anaplan journey from 150 users to over 1500. → What's next for JLR's Anaplan Journey and their COE. → Why curiosity is the greatest career hack for EPM professionals. Visit all the pertinent links: cothryve.co/links

Billy Leigh is the Head of Strategy at Embark Consulting. He joins Chad Pyke today to talk about Embark's new partnership with Anaplan and their unique approach to finance transformation, change management, and how they help consultants build amazing careers. In this episode you'll learn:  → How finance transformation can help companies win the war for top talent. → Successful finance transformation is about helping companies make better decisions.  → How to help clients manage change in the transformation journey.  → The critical shift people need to make in their career to level up their leadership.  → What Embark is doing to build the best Anaplan practice and develop their consultants.  Visit all the pertinent links: cothryve.co/links

Einas Ibrahim is a Master Anaplanner, EPM consultant, and problem solver at heart. She joins Chad Pyke on The EPM Show to talk about how she develops great consultants as a Master Anaplanner. In this episode you'll learn: → How to measure success on a project based on the development of those you lead. → Being a great consultant goes beyond the technical skills and is dependent on “human skills”. → The role of the Master Anaplanner in the ecosystem. → How to build a culture of learning and development at a consulting firm. → The difference in training and development and why it's important to separate the two. Visit all pertinent links + find out how much Anaplan professionals are getting paid ($$$): cothryve.co/links

This week on the Revenue Insights Podcast we are bringing you a very special episode all about deal slippage. Featuring insights from our previous guests Sandeep Wagchoure, Jeremy Bono, Steven Birdsall, Joey Gilkey, and Jaime Konzelman, this is an episode you don't want to miss out on. Sandeep Waghchoure is the Vice President of Sales Operations at insightsoftware. His career has primarily revolved around Dell, where he assumed several significant leadership positions, culminating in the role of Senior Director of Global Finance Operations. In 2022, he embarked on a new chapter, joining insightsoftware, where he is spearheading the development and expansion of operational capabilities aimed at achieving enhanced sales productivity and accelerated quote-to-cash velocity within a dynamic and rapidly growing environment. Jeremy Bono is a visionary leader with a record of developing and executing strategies that drive growth and profitability in hyper-competitive markets. As the current GM/VP Sales at Phenom, he is responsible for leading enterprise and industry vertical sales teams. He is further an Executive Member of Pavilion, hosting monthly standup meetings with other members to create a community to share and learn. Steven Birdsall is an impressive and passionate man, having been a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) four times over, and a Chief Operating Officer (COO) six. His most recent role was as the Executive Vice President of Global Sales at Qlik, and prior to that he was the Head of HCM Cloud Application Sales at Oracle; CRO at Anaplan; and the Executive Vice President and CRO at Radial Inc. Joey Gilkey is a serial founder and entrepreneur with multiple high-value exits behind him. He is the CEO of Apex Revenue which operates as a fractional VP of Sales to ramp sales results at established B2B companies. He is an innovative thought leader because he thinks outside of the box, strips away what's superfluous, and focuses on the core drivers of sales outcomes. Joey believes that with the evolution of technology and processes, companies have added multiple layers over the core processes hence losing sight of what counts. Jaime Konzelman is the Vice President of Sales at Unisys. Jaime has also held the position of Vice President of Sales at Atos. Before that, she was a Marketing Manager at Acxiom, Luxor Hotel and Casino, and Posterscope. She also has vast knowledge and experience in business and people management and is constantly looking for ways to improve relationships that will foster business growth.

Introducing thoughtbot's ongoing maintenance service. Need reliable support and maintenance for your software? Look no further. Our expert team handles upgrades, bug fixes, UI adjustments, and new feature development. And the best part? Our maintenance packages start at just 5k per month for companies of all sizes. From Ruby on Rails to Node, React, and, yes, even PHP, we've got you covered. Trust thoughtbot for top-notch support and optimized performance. To receive a custom quote, contact sales@thoughtbot.com. __ Simon Ritchie, the founder and CEO of Blox, discusses his background and journey leading up to starting the company. He began his career in finance but discovered his passion for technology and finance systems. He worked at Anaplan, a successful finance planning and analysis software company, but saw the limitations of rigid systems when COVID-19 hit. He realized there was a need for a more flexible and accessible financial modeling and planning tool, especially for small businesses and charities. Blox aims to fill this gap by providing a powerful yet easy-to-use modeling, calculation, and planning engine that sits between spreadsheets and complex enterprise software. The company is about a year old, has raised venture funding, and launched a free tier of its product. They prioritize building a compelling product, iterating quickly, and engaging with users to understand their needs. Simon acknowledges that building the product has been enjoyable, leveraging his background in product management. However, sales, marketing, and customer traction have proven challenging. Nonetheless, he remains optimistic about Blox's progress and is committed to providing a valuable solution to help businesses make informed decisions and achieve their financial goals. Blox (https://www.blox.so/) Follow Blox on Twitter (https://twitter.com/blox_is_awesome), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/blox.for.planning), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/blox-plan/), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/bloxisawesome/), or TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@bravewithblox/) Follow Simon Ritchie on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/siritchie/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. WILL: And I'm your other host, Will Larry. And with me today is Simon Ritchie, Founder and CEO of Blox, which provides pre-built planning models to help business leaders escape the tyranny of complex, clunky, and error-prone spreadsheets, giving you visibility into and confidence in the reality of your business. Simon, thank you for joining us. How are you doing today? SIMON: Hey, guys. Yeah, I'm very good today. VICTORIA: So, Simon, where are you joining us from today? SIMON: So, I'm joining from the UK. I live in a city called Brighton on the South Coast of the UK, where it's a lovely day today. It's nice and sunny. VICTORIA: Oh, that's where our thoughtbot summit has been the last two years, in Brighton, actually. SIMON: Fantastic. Yeah, it's a wonderful place. VICTORIA: And a great place to be in the summer right now, right? Do you get out in the water very often? SIMON: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Like many others, we have a paddle board. So, I go out with my family. I have four kids, so we go out and have fun at the beach. Brighton's got a stony beach. So we are, as Brightoners, we're very proud of the stones. You know, if you have sand, you get sand everywhere, stones are...it's much cleaner. [laughter] It does hurt your feet, though. There you go. [laughter] WILL: Yeah, that was the first time I've ever seen that, and I was like, that's very interesting. SIMON: Yeah. [laughs] WILL: I probably will like it because I don't like the sand getting everywhere, so... SIMON: Yeah, absolutely. WILL: So, yeah, I probably could trade that in. [laughs] SIMON: Yeah, yeah. You just have to wear shoes if you want to go run around. We're proud. We're proud of it. VICTORIA: I didn't think about that either. It makes a lot more sense. I don't really like the sand [laughter]. Rocks make more sense. But in California here, we're surfing, so having too many rocks on the beach would be a problem [laughs] for those of us who can't control ourselves. [laughter] SIMON: Yes. Yeah, Victoria, I thought you lived in Wales when I first looked at your profile -- VICTORIA: Oh, right. SIMON: On LinkedIn. And I thought, oh -- VICTORIA: That's...yeah. SIMON: A Welsh girl. That's -- VICTORIA: My family is actually Welsh on my mother's side. SIMON: Oh really? VICTORIA: Yeah. SIMON: Okay. VICTORIA: And Cardiff...California is named after Cardiff, Wales. SIMON: Okay, oh. VICTORIA: But yeah, so that's where it came from. So, I thought that was very cute, too. SIMON: [laughs] Very cool. VICTORIA: But, you know, Cardiff-by-the Sea is its own little beach town here. SIMON: It's not Wales. [laughs] VICTORIA: Not Wales. [laughs] Pretty different. But I do hear Wales is beautiful. SIMON: Oh, it is. Yeah, absolutely. VICTORIA: Awesome. Well, let's talk about Blox a little bit. So, why don't you tell us maybe a little bit about your background and how you came around to starting it? SIMON: Yeah, great. So, and just in terms of me and my background, so I started my career in finance, actually. I didn't really know what to go and study, so I thought, you know, studying numbers was probably a good thing. So, I did an accounting finance degree. And I got into the world of work in finance roles very quickly realized that finance wasn't for me. I just didn't really want to be a CFO. I just didn't feel the passion for it. But I was the techie guy always in the finance team. I was the guy people turned to and originally for, you know, Excel and spreadsheet modeling. And behind Excel, you've got VBA. So, you've got this little, you know, it was my first exposure to programming and some, you know, and what coding was. And so, I sort of just realized, actually, I love the technology side. And so, I followed my passion more into the finance systems arena. And my passion has always been...the focus of my career has been helping leaders understand what's going on in the business by getting hold of those numbers, the data that they have, and analyzing it, summarizing it, trying to draw insights from it so they can make decisions. And so, in the early days, it was lots of Excel spreadsheet modeling. And, in some businesses, there's still tons of spreadsheet modeling going on. And then the next phase of my career was actually working in...there are a number of software options that help you with planning, modeling, reporting, et cetera. So, I joined...well, I did some consulting for a while and then joined a company called Anaplan. And was an early employee, the company was still very early in their journey. They were just launching a European office, so I joined as one of the early European employees. And Anaplan went on, over the course of nearly eight years that I was there, to be [inaudible 04:31], absolute rocket ship, grew up to 2,000 people, and we floated on the New York Stock Exchange and then IPO in 2018. It was acquired last year for a very big number. So really fantastic time there. But to just talk about Blox, so I left Anaplan two years ago. The observations that I made that led to Blox ultimately were there were sort of three main aspects. Like, when COVID happened, the world changed radically. And what I saw...I was working in Anaplan. For anyone who doesn't know, Anaplan they focus on selling to large enterprise. So, you may not be familiar with the company if you're not a CFO or a finance person in a very large company. And they sell very expensive product. It's very, very powerful modeling, calculation, FP&A, finance planning, and analysis software. And so, companies...we were working with companies like Procter & Gamble, HP, Cisco, Google, and others. What I observed was when COVID kicked in, the FP&A system was too rigid. So, Anaplan, you know, these models that people had built up, spent a lot of time and energy building up, it was too rigid. The world changed so much that they couldn't really use their typical budgeting systems or these FP&A solutions. They couldn't use Anaplan. So, everybody just jumped back into a spreadsheet to figure out, you know, do I still have a business? How am I going to survive this if I just had to shut all my retail stores or if I had to send everybody home? You know, so everyone was using spreadsheets, basically. And so my observation there was that the tools that are available at that point are still way too hard to use. They're not flexible enough. You can't mold them quickly enough to really handle some of those scenarios that you want to throw at it as a leader. So, when you're trying to make big decisions about new revenue streams, new offices that you would want to launch, restructuring your team, investing in more people, those things they're really hard to model in the tools that are available. You need real specialist experience and expertise. That's very expensive, et cetera. So that was one part. And then the other thing that happened was I've worked most of my career in larger companies. And I'd worked in, yeah, in finance, in businesses. And also, I'm a chartered management accountant. It's all about helping with managing a business with your numbers. And I hadn't really worked with many very small companies. I ended up volunteering. When the lockdowns were happening, there were lots of people that were sheltering in place and they were staying at home. And so, a local charity had organized to put together food parcels, and then they found drivers to drive them around. And so I had volunteered through a friend of a friend, and somewhere my name got put in. So, I ended up driving these food deliveries around for the summer, and I loved it. Every Thursday, I'd take a couple of hours to just drive around and drop some food on people's doorsteps and then maybe have a quick conversation with them from a distance. I got connected with the charity. It is a local charity that runs on the South Coast in England here. And they found out I was an accountant, and I worked in software technology. They were like, [gasps], please, you can be our new best friend. We need some help. So, I ended up helping them a bit in their back office with some of the reporting that they do. And to cut a long story short, they're a charity. They live on grant funding that they get. So, they apply for grants, and then the grant providers want them to report back on the progress that they've made, the services that they've offered, the people they've helped. So, I went and helped them, and they needed these reports and some plans for grants that they were trying to get. What seemed really easy to me, like, they were showing me that they had to download this data from a system. And they needed to filter it and then count how many people they had been helping. And they basically were just, you know, with different needs and in different categories and cohorts. So, they would basically download the data, open it in a spreadsheet, put a filter on, select some filters, and then they would count the number of rows that had that criteria. And then, they would type the number into an email. And I just showed them some very simple things, like, when you do a filter or if you select the cells, you can see a countdown at the bottom-right in Excel, and I showed them that. And they almost fell off their chair because [laughs] they were like, "Oh, you know, why did we not see that sooner?" But I suppose through that, and, you know, through the various times that I helped them...and I just helped them with initially some spreadsheets and just some help with that. But it just showed me that there are a lot of businesses, a lot of charities in this case, but a lot of businesses where the leaders are not finance savvy, and they are not accountants. They're not MBAs, but they still need help running their business. They need to do reporting. They need to do planning, you know, manage their business, control the finances. So, I just thought, you know, just started thinking a lot more about what does a small business need? What does a leader in a business need to make great decisions, run the business? And how could we get them a tool or some software that doesn't cost hundreds of grand every year but is accessible, a nice, low price point, and really easy for them to use? And that's the problem that I thought about for a long time. And ultimately, that's what we're trying to work on with Blox. WILL: That's amazing. I used to work at a nonprofit. And I remember those days of, like, because I wasn't an MBA, like you said, MBA finance and just trying to figure out numbers. I don't even remember the software we used. SIMON: [laughs] WILL: But it was old and very hard to maneuver. [laughter] SIMON: Oh yeah. WILL: It was harder to maneuver than spreadsheets. And I was like, ahh, this is a nightmare. So, this is amazing that you're doing that. Can you tell us more about how Blox solves that issue? Because it sounds like it is a tween of big software that's for enterprise companies and spreadsheets. So, it's kind of in the middle; it sounds like. SIMON: So, spreadsheets are great. They're really easy. They're easy to start with. You'll often find that your spreadsheet will just kind of reach its natural end. It becomes too complex. And that normally happens when you've got, like, you're planning for lots of people, or lots of products, or lots of different projects. And so, you end up sort of having to figure out how to scale the model, you know, across lots of different columns or rows, or you start copying. And how you'll have three identical tabs or ten identical tabs. And, at that point, you've basically outgrown Excel, and trying to keep that spreadsheet running and working it becomes a real nightmare. And so, that's the point where Blox comes in. You could use Blox right from the very beginning. We've started with a focus on making really nice, simple models that you can just pick up and use. So, our earliest customers are startups doing a financial model for a brand-new idea. So, you can use Blox from the beginning, but you could probably use a spreadsheet, too. Where you would want to use Blox is where it becomes more complex, and you've got a lot more going on. You might have lots of different months, and you've got loads of time. You might want to connect it to your actual accounting system or a CRM system. And so, when you want to pull in actual data and do some reporting and maybe have different scenarios, different versions of a plan or of a report, that's where you've basically outgrown a spreadsheet, and it just becomes complex and unwieldy. And that's where you would want to move into a system. That's what we're building with Blox is basically a powerful modeling calculation planning engine that scales really easily. So, you can build up your dimensions, products, countries, time, et cetera, and you can build up those dimensions. You can build up your logic. You can add your own KPIs. You can add your own projection logic, et cetera. You can build out a model. We've got lots of template models that you can start with because you shouldn't have to start from scratch every time. You can get going. You can load up your own data very quickly at the beginning. For a lot of models, it's just assumptions. You're just trying to work out, okay, like, we've got some service businesses that use Blox. To get a basic model together, what you need to know is how many people do you have roughly? How much do you pay them? And then, how many people do you plan to hire at certain times? And how long does it take to ramp a new hire? Because, normally, there's some sort of ramp time. And if it's a service business and you're selling time, then you kind of have an average number of hours billable or often called utilization. So, with a few quick assumptions, you could throw them in. You could build out a multi-year plan for your business. And you could use that to think about, okay, how can I grow this business? I kind of talk about it as a financial roadmap that you could create. So, you know, often in the product world, we talk about product roadmaps. I like to talk about, you know, a business roadmap or financial roadmap. And that's really what we are working on; Blox and Blox will help you with this financial roadmap that you can build out. You know, I'd like to get my business to this point to, you know, 2 million in revenue, or 10 million in revenue, or maybe there are some financial or non-financial goals that you're trying to get to. And, with a model, you can help try and kind of work out what the assumptions and drivers and what those things need to look like. And then, as a manager of the business, you can start working on, okay, how do I increase my headcount? Or how do I decrease this particular cost per unit or various things like that? So yeah, that's a very high level on what we're doing with Blox. VICTORIA: Thank you for that. And I certainly can relate to that, having worked for several different consulting services companies and how difficult it can be to get software [laughs] to project that -- SIMON: [laughs] VICTORIA: Far into the future, like, to think about how you're going to hire, all the things that go into it. So, I'm curious about your own plan for Blox. Like, how would you describe where you are in your plan for the company? SIMON: We are a year old, actually just celebrated our one-year anniversary. In the last year, we've formed, hired an early team. We've fundraised successfully. So, we raised venture finance to fund the business. It's a complex product to build. We're trying to replace a spreadsheet, which has got tons and tons of features. They've been developing that for a long time. So, for someone to come across, it needs to be a relatively mature product. So, we raised venture funds from investors. We're busy investing that to build up the product and take that to market. It's been a fantastic year. And this is my first time as a founder. I've worked in leadership roles in technology businesses, in customer success, and in product as well. Yeah, I definitely would say working as a founder in a brand-new startup is very different to working in product, in a scale-up. You know, some of the lessons that I learned back there have been useful. You know, you learn how to juggle chaos, how to juggle...how to spin lots of plates. But yeah, I'm really delighted with our progress so far. We've fundraised. We ran a beta of our product last year with some early customers. We graduated from that. Our approach has always been to try and get the product out, so really embrace agile. It's kind of you don't see it so often in enterprise software. What you see is companies that like to just put "Book a demo" on the website. And they don't like to show their software until they've already kind of sold the value, and they've pitched, you know, positioned their pricing, and qualified their leads, et cetera. Our approach has always been let's build a fantastic product. Let's build something which is super compelling, super easy to use. Let's get people into the product as quickly as possible so they can experience it, see if it's going to be valuable for them. We launched a free tier of our product, the first sort of MVP, as a free tier, so not paid, not with some of the features that we plan to add to the product. And so, we've got that out there, and it's been fantastic. We've got users from all over the world using it in all sorts of different ways. And that's the other thing that is really great for us. Because it's such a flexible product, it can be used in lots of places. So, we've got all sorts of different applications being used by it. People jump in; they use it. They can try different templates that we've got. And then, if they need something different...every business is slightly different. So, if they need something slightly different, they can just chat to us in the product. We absolutely love chatting to people. And then, you know, we'll often spin up a custom template for them. And when we've done a few of those, then we'll build a standard template for a new industry. That's a little bit about where we're at. We're a small team based between here and India, where most of our developers are. It's good fun. Some of the learning...so I would say maybe it's just because of my background. So, I moved into product, and I was a product manager and then product leader for the last six years. So, for me, I've found building the product has been the easier part, probably because it's my background and that's where my passion is. So, I absolutely love anytime I get to spend in the product and spend with the team. The original founding team is myself as founder and CEO. And I don't get too much time on the product. I have a product manager and a designer. And so, that was the first...the early team, the founding team. And then we've added marketing and some other roles and software development. And so that's the team. I've found building the product has been really fun, and that's been a bit easier. Trying to work out how to do fundraising was a real challenge, so that took a lot of energy. We've been pretty successful so far in that. Still, always more to go, always more fundraising needed definitely. The really hard thing, especially in the market that we're in right now, it's hard, you know, getting early customer traction and selling. And that's really hard trying to get your name out there, build a brand, find early customers. That's really hard. So yeah, that's definitely an observation for me that the product has been really fun and a bit easier than I thought. But yeah, trying to do sales, marketing, figure that out...and probably as well because it's not my background or my kind of natural area of interest, so I've been learning. That's always tough, isn't it? Mid-Roll Ad: VICTORIA: Introducing thoughtbot's ongoing maintenance service. Need reliable support and maintenance for your software? Look no further. Our expert team handles upgrades, bug fixes, UI adjustments, and new feature development. And the best part? Our maintenance packages start at just 5K per month for companies of all sizes. From Ruby on Rails to Node, React, and, yes, even PHP, we've got you covered. Trust thoughtbot for top-notch support and optimized performance. To receive a custom quote, contact sales@thoughtbot.com. VICTORIA: And with me here, I have Richard Newman, who is the Development Director on our Boost Team, to talk to me a little bit more about what maintenance actually looks like once you've built your software application, right? RICHARD: Hi, Victoria. VICTORIA: Hi, Richard. You have experience building applications. I wonder if you could describe to a founder who's considering to build an application, like, what should they consider for their long-term maintenance? RICHARD: Well, like you said earlier, part of what you're going for with that long-term maintenance is making sure the health of your project, of your application, is always there. And you don't want to be surprised as you're continuing to work with your users and so forth. And so, a number of things that we pay attention to in maintenance are, we're paying attention to keeping the application secure, providing security updates. We want to make sure that the ecosystem, basically, all of the tools and third-party services that are tied to your application that, we're responding to those sorts of changes as we go along. And then part of it is, occasionally, you're going to find some smaller issues or bugs or so forth as your user group continues to grow or as needs continue to change. You want to be able to respond to those quickly as well. And so, a lot of what goes into maintenance is making sure that you're paying attention and you're ahead of those things before they surprise you. VICTORIA: Because what can happen? Like, what are the consequences if you don't do that ongoing maintenance? RICHARD: Well, the security updates those happen across gems and in the platform sort of tools that are there. And so, if you're not keeping those up to date, your exposure, your vulnerability to being hacked, or having a bad actor come into your application start growing on you if you're not doing the maintenance. The other ones that can come up is there's new interfaces that these third-party services...they may be updating their APIs. They may be updating how you're supposed to work with their tool. And so, those can occasionally break if you're not paying attention to what's going on or you're suddenly surprised by an upgrade that you have to make. And then, finally, there's this long-term sort of code change that just builds up over time if you're not keeping it refactored for the changes that are upcoming in a language or the gems that you work with. And then, suddenly, after a while, it suddenly gets to the point where you have a lot of work that you might have to do to rehabilitate the application to take on some of the newer features that are being released. And so, that makes it that much more difficult, that much more friction about being able to deliver updates for your users or to be able to respond to changes that are happening out there in your application. VICTORIA: Right. So, if you don't have that ongoing maintenance, you could run into a situation where, suddenly, you need to make a very large investment and fixing whatever is broken. RICHARD: Absolutely. It's going to be very tough to plan for if you weren't keeping up all the way along and, yes, absolutely ends up being much slower if you have to remediate it. VICTORIA: That makes sense. I wonder if you have any examples of a project you've walked into and said, "Wow, I wish we had been doing a little bit more maintenance." [laughs] And maybe you can share some details. RICHARD: Yeah. We had a fairly large application that involved a number of clinic services. So, we had an application that users were going in every day and counting on our fast response. And, over time, we've got surprised by a database upgrade that had to happen. Basically, the database was going to be changed by our third-party hosting service, and that hadn't been tested. There hadn't been procedures in place when we discovered this need. And there was a very hard date that that change had to be done or else the entire application was going to go down. And it came at a very inconvenient time, at the end of the year around Christmas, that we had to respond to all of that. And had we been in front of it and just updated it every quarter and staying current with it, it wouldn't have been nearly the lift that it turned out to be. We were facing a pretty hard deadline [laughs] there to keep things going. It was very, very stressful and disruptive for the team and potentially for the clinics. VICTORIA: Right. And it always happens around a big holiday or something like that, right? When it all comes to a head. So... [laughter] RICHARD: Absolutely. You want to be in control of the timeframe and not have the timeframe be in control of you. VICTORIA: Right. And if you have a team like thoughtbot supporting you, you can go on your vacation with a little bit more knowledge that if something breaks, there's someone there who can respond and fix things, and you don't have to interrupt your very valuable time off. So... RICHARD: [chuckles] Absolutely. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Richard, for joining me today. I appreciate you coming here to talk with us. And we'll talk to you again soon. RICHARD: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you. WILL: You mentioned getting your product out there how challenging it can be. So, what has been some other wins and some challenges that you've had as a first-time founder? SIMON: So, my approach to things as a leader is I basically like to bring silliness and games to help motivate and energize the team. So, as a human, I have quite a lot of energy. I roll around with lots of energy. And I take loads of photos of what I'm doing, and I share those. So, we have a Friday wrap-up with the team, and so I'll often share a lot of the pictures of, you know, what I've been up to this week. So, yeah, there's been some really fantastic moments launching a product. We launched our MVP in three months. So, we basically set off...I actually funded the first season of the business, a couple of software developers, a couple of early employees. I funded the first season. We hadn't raised money. And I just spoke to my wife, and I said, "Look, now's the time. I really want to do this." You know, I've been saving up if you like, I had this, like, one day I'll do a startup fund. Some people would probably call that their long-term savings or like, you know, some...and I kind of called it my one day I'll do a startup fund. So, I'd been building up this fund because I knew that at some point, I'll probably go do this. The timing was way earlier than I thought. I thought I'd still do another four or five years in a career in a corporate role to try and get a few more notches in my belts to make fundraising easier, et cetera. The timing came. The team was perfect. And everything just felt right, so we went for it. But yeah, we basically set out. We didn't know where we were going to get funding from. The market was in a real state, so this was middle of 2022. The Ukraine war had kicked in; valuations had dropped by 90% for a lot of tech companies. The post-COVID bubble had burst. It was hard. So, we sat down, and we were like, okay, we could spend all of our runway trying to fundraise now, or we could crack on and try and build the first MVP. But we'd already done a lot of the market research, the user testing, early prototypes, et cetera. And that's a bit of a long story. But we had done that in the company that the founding team had worked at, and then we were actually a spin-out. So that happened. And we were sitting here thinking, okay, you know, we could spend all of our runway fundraising, or we could just crack on and build a product as quick as we can in the next three months. And so, we had this really hard conversation where we descoped so much stuff. And we just figured out what's the core piece that will really show the value of what we're trying to build, that we'd give to a user, that we could give to an early customer that they could use and get value from? And so, we came up with that scope. And we cracked on, and we built it. Within two and a half months, we had a working version. We played with it. Within three months, we kind of launched into this beta and got early users onto. So that was, you know, fantastic. So, we did that in the first three months, and then off the success of having an MVP, and just being able to show the product, and start getting some early user feedback, initial feedback was, you know, we took into account very quickly and improved. And just having that, you know, you basically start building momentum. Every step is still really hard, but you do build momentum. So, we got this product. We launched it. We went to a couple of events, and we talked about that, and then we did some fundraising. And we landed some funding, so that was fantastic. And then, you know, and then we've just gone sort of step by step from there. So, it's really fantastic what we've been able to achieve so far. The challenges there's been loads of them, especially when you're building a startup. It's really exciting. So, you can get people excited quite easily about the future potential. And you can kind of talk about what this can be. I've got a printed picture of a unicorn on my whiteboard in my office right here as a sort of a statement of, you know, where we're going. It's really hard as a founder or a leader trying to persuade people to leave a stable job, take a pay cut, and come and work with you and give them some equity, which you hope will be worth a ton, and you kind of paint the picture. But also, you don't know how long you can keep them because you're on runway. You're on runway. You haven't got infinite cash if it's not a profitable business. So, you know, there are some real challenges. And, as a founder, you go through ups and downs. Ben Horowitz talks about it in his great book, The Hard Things About Hard Things, as the struggle. I definitely understand that a lot more now because there is an up and down to this. You do build momentum, but you also...you're creating the momentum, you know, one hard push at a time. So that's that early customers come on. You kind of pitch the dream of what the product will do, and then it will fall over as soon as they touch it. But I absolutely love it. What I love is the chance to create and how quickly you can move in the early days of a startup or a new product, where you don't have masses of technical debt. You don't have hundreds of customers. You don't have all this, you know, you don't have a massive team where everyone's got their point of view on what you should do. So, you can move really fast, and that's fantastic [inaudible 30:14] creative season. So yeah, lots of ups and downs, but it's really fun. VICTORIA: That's so interesting and particularly interesting that you're trying to make something that's easier to use than Excel. So, I'm curious how you're testing to make sure that it's actually easy. And what might be...I'm sure there's some interesting feedback you got about that. SIMON: Yeah, so we're making Blox easier than Excel. But it's got to be powerful enough to be able to handle the data and the modeling that you need for a business. If you're doing projections for multiple years if you've got lots of products or teams, then it can be complex, so it needs to be powerful enough to handle that. It needs to be flexible enough because you can take a template, but every business has got its own unique quirks. So, it needs to be flexible enough that it can be tailored easy for a unique business. And then, crucially, and this is also important, it needs to be easy enough to use so that the person who understands the business can change the model to kind of suit their business. That's the bit that most of the other players, you know, the enterprise software that's available today, just that they haven't figured out how to make it easy enough so that a businessperson that, you know, doesn't have database experience, can't write SQL, not going to write Python, you know, doesn't do complex scripting or any of this stuff. It's got to be easy enough that they can, you know, tailor, reflect the way that their business works, the way that they make money, the way that their cost structure works, so they can figure out what drives the business. And so, if they're projecting revenue, they can work out the costs associated. So, one of our founding team is a UX designer, a really, really fantastic designer, very experienced. He's been in the game for 25 years since, way before it was called UX. And started doing graphic design, and then has done lots of branding and branding for some really fantastic, large companies, did lots of consulting. And then got into UX and how, you know, the art of wireframing and helping to make products easily usable. I call him my secret weapon. I've worked with some fantastic designers in the past, so, as a founder, I think I appreciate and understand the value of a really good design and a really good UX designer. So, Mike, our UX designer, has just been fantastic at that. He's very good at wireframing and very good at testing. And he's not a finance planning expert. That's why I call him my secret weapon because, you know, I understand planning really well, but sometimes I understand it too well. When I describe what a user is trying to do or, you know, what I expect a screen will look like, I'm just probably subconsciously replacing or recreating something that I've seen or used before, whereas he's coming at it brand new. He's not worked in planning or data modeling, or many of these things. He's worked in lots of different businesses. So, he comes at it with a mobile-first perspective. Normally, he's thinking about, okay, how could this be used by a busy leader on their phone and they're running around? And so, he's been really fantastic at helping to keep it simple and easy and to rethink and to create a product, which is just so different to what other tools in the space are doing. And that's some of the feedback we get. It looks so different. It works so different. But yeah, the hard thing is that spreadsheets are the most sticky tool, I think. They're just so useful for, you know, for everything where you need to get a list of things. You just start throwing it into a spreadsheet, and then you can, you know, organize it and improve structure over time. But yeah, it's a really sticky tool. And we train people how to use spreadsheets from early days from school. My 12-year-old daughter she already has been taught how to use a spreadsheet in school. So, what we're trying to do is create something which is easier. But there's also, you know, you want there to be some familiarity in there so that people will...to avoid some of the friction of the people who have it. No one really signs up to learn a new tool if they can avoid it. We're lazy. [laughs] VICTORIA: It makes sense that design would be a big priority for your product because that was your intention from the beginning, right? Is to make something that's easy to use, so you prioritize that as an investment. SIMON: That's right. That's absolutely right. Yeah. VICTORIA: What's on the horizon? What are you the most excited about for Blox in the coming months? SIMON: So, yeah, we've got some really exciting elements of our roadmap coming. So, yeah, really excited to see these things come to life. Like anyone working in building products, whether you're designing, doing product, sort of overseeing, or actually developing, it's so great to see these things come to life. You spend a long time thinking and chatting about them, imagining, ideating about how they could look. The thing that I'm just most excited about is—and that's probably why I love product—is, you know, you're building a product, and then you can...then you're talking to somebody about how they would use this. Or before that, you're talking about their day-to-day right now and what their problems are, and how you could help them save time, save money, et cetera. And so, you know, I absolutely love chatting to more and more different types of companies, leaders in different parts of the business. And, you know, especially in our space, it's mostly about, okay, how can I help? You know, how could we improve this planning process that we've got, whether it's, you know, planning for the cost of running a big project or trying to figure out how can I scale my business to reach my objectives? So, I just love chatting to lots of different leaders globally. So, I love going to events, chatting to people, fact-finding about how they run their business, how they think about finances, et cetera. In terms of the product roadmap, we're working on some exciting new scenario capabilities, so you can easily look at different scenarios around a decision. So, you might be trying to decide, you know, should I be aggressive with my investments and hiring, or should I be pessimistic? Or is there a middle ground? So, we're adding, like, scenario capabilities where you can build out different versions of that, and then easily compare and contrast, and then decide which one to do. We're working on some really...really enjoying working on some intelligent capabilities. So, again, in the search of making it really easy to use for a busy leader, for a busy businessperson, or a busy finance person, making it really easy to use. So, we've invested a lot in AI technology and been designing, developing POCs around how AI could help to onboard customers faster, how we could help to personalize models for businesses automagically. So, as soon as we understand the website of a user, what sort of industry they're in, we can automagically personalize the template for them, add their own KPIs, like, industry-specific KPIs, into the model, and throw in benchmark data and all these things. So, we've got some fantastic AI capabilities coming through the pipe and some data integrations. As we get out more and more, we're connecting to different data sources. So, yeah, exciting times ahead for the roadmap. And as we add more features, then we'll add different pricing tiers, you know, so we can try and offer a nice, affordable entry-level offering for Blox, but then we will, you know, as you get more and more different features, you'll pay at the appropriate level. So that's a little bit about what our future looks like. WILL: That's neat some of the things you have coming up. You mentioned AI and how you're kind of embracing that. Can you expound on that? Like, kind of I know you said some data models automagically is going to do it. But, like, where can you see the benefit for a customer to use that? Because I know AI can be scary and stuff like that. But, like, just kind of taking the fear out of it and talking about how beneficial it can be. SIMON: Yeah. So, there's lots of different places where AI can help. So, the typical model today for finance planning is you'd have a leader who's responsible for the business, and they're responsible for an advertising budget. You know, they just intuitively know, you know, where should I spend money, what's good return on my investment, what's, you know, what works. But when it comes to actually trying to model that, so how to put that into a financial model or some other model that you can understand the relationships between these things, put in the KPIs, have the formulas, calculating things in the right way at the right level, what you often find is that the leader is not the system's expert. So, you'll often have, especially in bigger businesses, you've got this expert data analyst or FP&A finance planning person that will do the modeling. So, we really believe that AI can be like a digital business coach to digitize that business advisory piece. So, the leader can be sitting down. They can be looking to try and improve some part of their business or understand some part of their spend and trying to work out, like, what would life look like if I increased my spend on this particular channel by X? And so, you know, we are looking at AI to help with lots of different areas around this. Initially, it's helping a new user to get onboarded with Blox. So, it's taking a template and helping to personalize it for their business. What we basically try and do is fetch as much data about a new user and a new company as possible. So, if their team is on their website, then we'll pull in their team. If their products are listed on their website, we'll pull in a list of their products and try and throw that into the model and take out a lot of the friction that you have. As a user in the new system, you have to type in everything normally. If you're trying to model a business, you used to type it all in or copy and paste it from a spreadsheet. So, we're looking at lots of options to help onboard new users. That has a good value add for us because we can increase the speed of adoption and help get users to value faster, which is great for us. And also, users are, you know, they're busy. They're impatient, and they want to understand what value they're going to get before they spend lots more of their time. So that's going to be useful for us and them. And yeah, helping to interpret the data. So, they'll connect us to their source systems. We'll be able to interpret what's going on, help them to understand different options and scenarios about how things might play out in the future. Basically, AI will help us to draw our insights that we can present to the user, will help explain what the user is looking at when they're looking at the model, so we can summarize some of the key insights so that they can use that. We're expecting to have all sorts of users, but we're really focusing on really busy leaders who may have a good understanding of spreadsheets and data, but they're just too busy, and so they don't have time. So, they want something which is quick and easy. Or leaders who don't have that expertise, so those are the ones that we really cater for. We try and keep it really simple and help guide them through the process, et cetera. So that's where AI is going to be, like, that digital business AI...We kind of kind of talk about this AI business coach concept. And, over time, we'll build up more and more elements to that coach capability. We call him Anton in our team when we talk. We'll add more and more capabilities to him. But we've built a number of different POCs. And we've launched a couple of those with some customers. We've been out to events and showing off these new capabilities to basically test them out, understand what's working, what's not. What more do we need to think about to productionize this proof of concept? So that's, yeah, it's a very exciting time to be working on those things. VICTORIA: I love hearing about that. That's super interesting to see where it's going to go. So, my last question for you today is, is there anything else that you would like to promote? SIMON: I think I would just say, yeah, if you're a leader running a business or maybe it's a service business, and you're trying to think about, you know, when hiring business planning, financial planning, anything like that, then I'd love for you to come over to Blox, and you can jump straight into the product from our website. You can sign up. I absolutely love chatting to people about their businesses and what they're trying to do with their finances. So, if you want to do that, you can sign up. You can chat to us. I actually take a lot of time to respond to people in there, so yeah, if you want to do that. Or, if you can, also find me on LinkedIn. You can search me there. Just strike up a conversation and say, "Hey, Simon, I'd love to chat about financial roadmapping or finance planning." Yeah, I absolutely just love to speak to different leaders that work right across the business in different roles and see how we can help them to build a business that really unlock the potential that they have in their business through a great understanding of finances. So, yeah, if I can be of help, I would love that. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And we'll have all those links in the show notes so our audience can go and take a look. WILL: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @will23larry. VICTORIA: And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Simon Ritchie.

This week on the Revenue Insights Podcast, we're joined by four-time CRO and six-time COO, Steven Birdsall In this episode, Steven delves into the core fundamentals of building a sales team; how both sales and operations can function together as a cohesive unit; how successful people think about life and business; and the most important, key qualities of a top performer. He also explains the true value of mentoring and how to use it to ensure your team's success. Steven Birdsall is an impressive and passionate man, having been a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) four times over, and a Chief Operating Officer (COO) six. His most recent role was as the Executive Vice President of Global Sales at Qlik, and prior to that he was the Head of HCM Cloud Application Sales at Oracle; CRO at Anaplan; and the Executive Vice President and CRO at Radial Inc.

Justin D'Onofrio is the Managing Director of Performance Management at Accordion. He's been in the EPM space for over 15 years as a consultant and co-founder of Platform Specialists which he sold to Accordion in 2022. In this episode you'll learn: → Why it's important to keep people at the center of digital transformation. → How to listen well and push back to ultimately deliver great client experiences. → How co-building best practices improve the feedback loop and lead to better outcomes. → Accelerating your career starts with getting your hands dirty with the latest technology. Visit all pertinent links + find out how much Anaplan professionals are getting paid ($$$): cothryve.co/links

Bhavik Vashi is the Managing Director of Asia Pacific at Carta and the FIRST repeat guest on The EPM Show. He now works with VCs and startup founders every day in addition to having a decade of experience under his belt at Anaplan. He returns to the show to talk about the future of EPM and what it takes to build a great career moving forward. Tune into this episode to learn: → What some of the newest, most innovative startups are doing in the EPM space. → How the economics in the APAC region is leading to an innovative commercial model. → What generative AI means for the future of EPM solutions. → How to thrive as an EPM professional in an AI world. Visit all pertinent links: cothryve.co/links

Zaf Kamar is the founder of Constellation, an Anaplan implementation partner, and has led 2 Anaplan practices at Gold partner firms. He joins Chad on the EPM Show to talk about values aware implementation. In this episode you will learn: → Why it's important to incorporate a company's values into digital transformation efforts. → How your company can truly exercise accountability, collaboration, and sustainability as values at an organizational and individual level. → What it means to be a culture carrier in your organization and why that will help you in your career. → How to recognize the difference between your company's espoused values and the behaviors that are rewarded to elevate your career and accelerate your influence. Visit all pertinent links + find out how much Anaplan professionals are getting paid ($$$): cothryve.co/links

John Sanchez is a highly sought after corporate finance consultant and keynote speaker. He is the Managing Director of financial planning and training consultancy FPA Group, LLC with more than 20 years' experience working at a top ten accounting firm and holding leadership positions at Fortune 500 companies. He joins host Chad Pyke to talk about how EPM professionals can accelerate their career by enhancing their communication skills. In this episode you'll learn: → How to overcome the most common mistakes that hold EPM professionals back from growing their influence. → Why too knowledge can actually hurt your ability to influence and what to do about it. → How honest feedback can accelerate your career even when it hurts. → How to set a clear path for your career by reverse engineering your big goals. Visit all pertinent links + find out how much Anaplan professionals are getting paid ($$$): https://linktr.ee/cothryve

SEASON: 2 EPISODE: 23Episode Overview:Amateurs in sales score occasional wins. Professionals create consistent results. Top sales professionals don't make quota, they exceed quota. They don't make sales, they create customers. They don't dream of earning a good living, they are living the good life.My guest has captured the time-tested sales wisdom of great salespeople that realized early in their career that learning means earning. Join me now for my conversation with author, and speaker Paul Melchiorre.Guest Bio: Paul Melchiorre is co-author of: Selling the Cloud: A Playbook for Success in Cloud Software and Enterprise Sales. He has 30 years of experience in enterprise software sales and business leadership. As Senior Vice President of Global accounts at SAP, Melchiorre and his group were responsible for over 85% of the company's revenue and helped establish SAP as the global STC Interior leader in enterprise software. Recently, Paul served as President and Chief Revenue Officer at Anaplan, a leading SaaS platform to facilitate financial planning and management. Paul is now sharing his proven, innovative approach as Operating Partner at Stripes and serves on multiple company boards. Resource Links:Product Link: https://www.amazon.com/Selling-Cloud-Playbook-Software-Enterprise/dp/B08L46W1WL/ref=sr_1_1?crid=39LVNAKFGUPLV&keywords=paul+melchiorre&qid=1685729414&sprefix=paul+melchiorre%2Caps%2C119&sr=8-1Insight Gold Timestamps:04:36 Passion and mindset05:10 If you have the right mindset, customers sense that08:25 You just happen to have the mainframe in your pocket now09:43 The cycle times are much shorter13:57 When things accelerate, fortunate or unfortunate, it does leave people behind16:23 However you communicate, you just have to work hard at it17:20 Take A students from B schools19:31 When these people go to their next company23:07 You've got to be authentic26:34 If you can bring in stories that bring their problems to life….27:41 The perception of the story 28:38 Process is more important than a playbook32:47 Are you really sure you want to be in this profession?35:35 If you're not in that environment, get out!36:48 What did I learn today?39:14 It's always important to stay currentConnect Socially:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/70261171/admin/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sellingthecloudbook/Twitter: https://twitter.com/sellingcloudYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=paul+melchiorreInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/sellingthecloud/Email: paul@stripes.coSponsors: Rainmaker Digital Solutions: https://www.rainmakerdigitalsolutions.com/Resources:

Zack Fennessy is the co-founder of Zenix Consulting and co-host of The Best Practice Podcast. He joins host Chad Pyke to talk about some of the trends they're seeing in the marketplace today. In this episode you'll learn: → How AI is changing customer expectations and the potential risks that come with it. → Why data integrations and structure are a critical part of the implementation process. → What most consultants miss in the discovery process and how to get it right. → How to get onto an Anaplan project without any Anaplan experience. Visit all pertinent links + find out how much Anaplan professionals are getting paid ($$$): https://linktr.ee/cothryve

Bhavik Vashi is the Managing Director of Asia Pacific at Carta and spent almost a decade at Anaplan. He started as a model builder and eventually moved on to lead all of Asia Pacific. He joins host Chad Pyke to talk about what it was like being at Anaplan in the early days as they built a new category in EPM and how he took smart risks in his career. In this episode you'll learn: → How Anaplan went from being a finance tool to a platform solution that was able to serve every department in an organization. → How customer obsession can lead you to new innovations. → What it was like to build the APAC region from the ground up. → Why mastering the product is absolutely critical to your career growth. → What EPM 3.0 will look like and why it isn't here yet. Visit all pertinent links + find out how much Anaplan professionals are getting paid ($$$): https://linktr.ee/cothryve

Katherine Andruha has been leading sales teams for 14 years at brands like Aruba Networks, Anaplan, Sugar CRM, Cloudflare, and now at Simpplr. Katherine's advice, "Focus on your job, and hit your numbers - you'll be OK" -  She also advises to speak up about your career goals and be intentional.  Katherine is now focused on strategy in her leadership roles. She encourages women to not just settle for a position - "life is too short to work for a crappy boss" - words to live by. 

What's happening in the EPM talent market? What do the most recent developments in AI and ChatGPT mean for EPM? And what does AI mean for my career? Blake & Chad jam on these topics and give you 3 keys to take advantage of the opportunity AI can present for you. This show is powered by CoThryve – the firm that helps EPM professionals grow their career. Visit all pertinent links + find out how much Anaplan professionals are getting paid ($$$): https://linktr.ee/cothryve

Season 4 Episode 46 | Recorded October 3, 2022 Accounting High is supported by our Booster Club Thank you LiveFlow!  https://www.liveflow.io/partnerships/accounting-high Get 20% off for 3 months with promo code HIGH In this episode of Accounting High, Scott speaks with Paul Barnhurst about his career in finance and FP&A. They discuss the differences between accounting and FP&A, the marketability of financial planning applications, and the influence of cloud technology. Paul shares insights on pricing, company success, and getting followers on LinkedIn. They also talk about branding and competition in the industry. Listen in to hear Paul's perspective on FP&A and his journey as a full-time finance influencer. Paul's number and the start with numbers Getting started on LinkedIn Starting his business and becoming a full-time Kim Kardashian of FPanda The podcast content and audience Accounting vs FP&A What do FP&A do vs Sales Influence without power? All the applications and who are they selling to? Excel hell and the marketability of these apps Pricing the right tool Why hasn't Microsoft made a tool? Google? The market and the cloud's influence Company founder success VC Money Hard numbers for Paul's business Who helps accounting More about why LinkedIn How did Paul get followers Posting habits What does a work week look like? Branding, name origin Competition? A rap for Paul LinkedIn stats Wrapping up All the Shoutouts: Jirav, Finmark, Clockwork, Anaplan, Salesforce, SheetRocks, Inc., Oracle, SAP, Xero, QuickBooks, Sage --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/accountinghigh/message

"Culture" is a difficult word for many leaders. It's either the fuel that's driving your growth or it's the weight that's holding you back.  How do you wrangle this wild card to work for you, not against you? Today, we talk with Jim Rich, Chief Revenue Officer for Vbrick Systems. In this episode, we will talk about several topics, including changes in the sales environment, culture shifts in organizations, and a unique technology that streamlines communication between senior leadership and their troops.  Jim Rich has over 25 years of sales leadership experience in the software industry, with expertise in digital transformation and business intelligence.  He has served in key sales and revenue marketing positions at Sisense, Anaplan, and Salesforce where he was the first commercial sales leader in the New York office, growing that team exponentially over seven years.  After listening to today's episode, check out the list of services offered by Vbrick to see how they can help you integrate video into your daily operations.

Bob Mahr and Dan Bredahl are the Managing Directors at Arete EPM. They've built a very successful team with an office in Hanoi Vietnam. The join host Chad Pyke to talk about what it takes to build a high-performing team across two continents. In this episode you'll learn: → How working globally can ultimately be an advantage for your clients. → Strategies for attracting and developing EPM consultants on international teams. → How to show appreciation for the different cultures represented on your teams. → Best practices for ensuring high quality delivery when working across continents. → What makes APAC special and why they love working with their team in Vietnam. Visit all pertinent links + find out how much Anaplan professionals are getting paid ($$$): cothryve.co/links

Ryan DuBiel is the Global Anaplan Practice Leader for Slalom Consulting and comes from a non-traditional background. He joins hosts Blake Bozarth & Chad Pyke to talk about leveraging a non-traditional background in EPM consulting & how to become an elite consultant. In this episode you'll learn: → The importance of pathological curiosity & asking dumb questions → Where the true value of Anaplan is and how to unlock it in your organization → What "augmented intelligence" is really about → How strong beliefs loosely held can help you differentiate yourself early in a career Visit all the pertinent links + find out how much Anaplan professionals are getting paid ($$$): cothryve.co/links

Orlando Bravo is a Founder and Managing Partner of Thoma Bravo. He led Thoma Bravo's early entry into software buyouts and built the firm into one of the top private equity firms in the world. Today, Orlando directs the firm's strategy and investment decisions. Orlando has overseen over 420 software acquisitions conducted by the firm, representing more than $235 billion in transaction value. Forbes named him "Wall Street's best dealmaker" in 2019, and he was dubbed "Private equity's king of SaaS" by the Financial Times in 2021. In Today's Episode with Orlando Bravo We Discuss: 1.) From Puerto Rico Roots to Wall Street's Best Dealmaker: How did Orlando come to co-found Thoma Bravo? What was that a-ha moment for him? Orlando mentioned 2 mentors that shaped how he thinks, who were they? What are his single biggest lessons from those mentors? What does Orlando know now that he wishes he had known when he started his career? Why does Orlando disagree with setting timelines in life? Why does it not help? 2.) The Secret to Success in Value Investing: What is good value investing today? What is it not? What three things does Orlando look for when doing a deal and acquiring a company? Why is every company in the world worth its future cash flows? How important is price today? How does Orlando reflect on his own price sensitivity? Many suggest Coupa and Anaplan were extremely expensive. How does Orlando respond and defend the prices he paid for companies in 2020-2022? 3.) WTF is Happening In Markets Today: How does Orlando reflect on where the market is today? Is this the new normal? How does Orlando expect the market to change over the next 12 months? Why does Orlando believe that the best companies win in the worst times? Is this the result of quantitative easing on behalf of central banks? Who is to blame? How does Orlando balance the mindset of his team between risk on and taking advantage of lower prices in market but also not catching a falling knife? 4.) Orlando Bravo: The Leader, Father and Husband: What is Orlando's biggest fear in investing? How has this changed over time? How does Orlando reflect on his own relationship to money today? How has that changed? What are Orlando's biggest parenting lessons from his mother? Why does Orlando believe that for most people, their late twenties are their toughest? How does Orlando instill the same drive and ambition in his children that he had, despite very different financial profiles growing up? How does Orlando maintain being at the top of his game in his profession but also being a great husband? What is the secret to a happy marriage? Items Mentioned in Today's Episode: Orlando's Fave Book: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Karen Clarke is the SVP and Managing Director for the Americas at Anaplan. In the current market, sales leaders face many challenges including a slowdown in the economy, difficulty finding staff, and sales attrition. Leaders must use data that provides insights into shifting buying behaviors.  Karen discusses the main things sales leaders should focus on for profitable growth like ensuring the alignment of sellers to the business objectives, knowing how to balance sales resources across the business, and the increasingly critical role of sales enablement and execution as the market gets tougher. Andy and Karen then dig into key concerns like attrition and capacity issues and how to deploy talent in the most effective way across territories. When planning for the next fiscal year, sales leaders should think carefully about how to segment their territories and target their reps in the most promising markets. HIGHLIGHT QUOTES CROs must get data on where sellers sell best - Karen: "Combining that with data in terms of where your market is and really having a good view of matching the right reps to the right opportunities. And obviously, aligning the quota to the size of those opportunities. So really thinking about what the addressable market is today for those sellers and doing that very intelligently." Sellers that can help buyers achieve real business value are prized - Karen: "Customers don't want sellers that just turn up and respond to what they're asking for. I think they're looking for sellers that bring something, organizations that bring something that share what they're seeing in other organizations, that challenge their thinking, maybe stretch their thinking a little bit in terms of what they could achieve." Find out more about Karen in the link below: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-clarke-9b73007/ More on Andy: Connect on LinkedIn Get Andy's new book "Sell Without Selling Out" on Amazon Learn more at AndyPaul.com Sponsored by: Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com Blueboard | World's leading experiential rewards & recognition platform | Blueboard.com Explore the Revenue.io Podcast Universe: Sales Enablement Podcast Selling with Purpose Podcast RevOps Podcast

Data is great, but understanding how to use the data is even more important. Dana Therrien, Vice President & CRO Practice at Anaplan, joins Alastair and Howard this week to talk about how actioning your data can make you a better runner as well as a better sales professional. Follow the Hosts on LinkedIn: Alastair Woolcock (CRO, Revenue.io) Howard Brown (CEO, Revenue.io) And our Special Guest: Dana Therrien (Vice President, Chief Revenue Officer Practice, Anaplan) Sponsored by: Revenue.io | Powering high-performing revenue teams with real-time guidance Explore the Revenue.io Podcast Universe: Sales Enablement Podcast Selling with Purpose Podcast RevOps Podcast *If you'd like to ask the guys a question that could get answered on the show, call our new message line at (323) 540-4777. Just leave your name, where you're from, and your question and we'll do our best to answer it on an upcoming episode.

Nurturing talent, especially in this tumultuous recessionary period, is more important than ever. Dana Therrien, Vice President & CRO Practice at Anaplan, returns with Alastair and Howard to talk about the best ways to support your team and help them succeed with the right tools and training. Follow the Hosts on LinkedIn: Alastair Woolcock (CRO, Revenue.io) Howard Brown (CEO, Revenue.io) And our Special Guest: Dana Therrien (Vice President, Chief Revenue Officer Practice, Anaplan) Sponsored by: Revenue.io | Powering high-performing revenue teams with real-time guidance Explore the Revenue.io Podcast Universe: Sales Enablement Podcast Selling with Purpose Podcast RevOps Podcast *If you'd like to ask the guys a question that could get answered on the show, call our new message line at (323) 540-4777. Just leave your name, where you're from, and your question and we'll do our best to answer it on an upcoming episode.