Accelerating territory & quota planning rollouts at Dassault Systèmes

Dassault Systèmes transforms from Excel chaos to streamlined quota planning—delivering six-week acceleration and $1M+ savings for their global sales operations.

Dassault Systèmes has built an impressive legacy. As a catalyst for human progress, they provide collaborative virtual environments that help more than 350,000 customers across 150 countries imagine sustainable innovations. With $6 billion in annual revenue and flagship brands like SolidWorks, CATIA, SIMULIA, and DELMIA, all Fortune 500 companies run some part of their product portfolio.

But behind this global success, their North America sales organization was struggling with a much more mundane problem: getting sales quotas out on time.

The challenge: Excel chaos at enterprise scale

Dan Barnes, Strategy and Transformation Leader overseeing planning for North America's largest sales organization, was managing 250 sales representatives across a $1.5 billion revenue operation. The complexity was overwhelming:

Excel limitations everywhere: "We were doing everything in Excel... all of our territory planning, all of our quota allocation... it got too large to be able to manage in Excel. We were missing timelines... we were inefficient."

Manual data nightmares: "We had no tool that really gathered a lot of the historical information within our territory. We would manually be pulling all that information together in Excel. Often times the reports would be incomplete, or from data sources that were disparate coming from different places."

Siloed manager planning: "They had their own methods of determining quotas... it was really a problem because at the end of the day... it resulted in misaligned resources."

Timeline failures: "Typically, we have our sales kickoffs probably in the middle of January. Our goal is to have quotas out by end of February... and we weren't very good at getting quotas out. We weren't done with quota distribution and finalization, until sometimes close to the end of April, which was completely unacceptable."

The matrix organization structure made everything worse. With both industry sales teams focused on vertical markets and brand sales teams focused on product portfolios, the allocation requirements were incredibly complex.

The solution: Strategic partnership for transformation

Dassault Systèmes chose Anaplan based on Gartner research and the platform's ability to handle their complex matrix organization while providing real-time visibility. But choosing the right implementation partner was equally important.

"We chose Keyrus as our integrator. They have a lot of experience with Anaplan; in fact, even within our company, there was a subsidiary that had already used Keyrus previously, so we relied on that expertise," Barnes explains.

The implementation addressed three critical areas:

Data Aggregation & Federation

• Multi-source integration aggregating 10 different data sets in one centralized location
• Real-time updates reflecting territory changes and employee movements immediately
• Enhanced visibility providing comprehensive territory coverage reports across industry and brand teams

Advanced Workflow Management

• Top-down account planning with sophisticated quota allocation and integrated manager coordination
• Bottom-up territory allocation with full visibility for all managers
• Cross-functional integration creating intersection capabilities between managers at the account level

System Integration Excellence

• ETL output generation with system-generated outputs for seamless distribution
• Controlled integration timing enabling flexible scheduling of downstream system updates
• Comprehensive integration with existing business systems