Strategies that led to winning the deal
- Understand the prospect’s current process and highlight the out-of-the-box features that best apply to their use case.
- Used the T&Q app demo not only to showcase the product but also as a live scoping session to understand fit and gaps and address their concerns about the gaps that are identified.
- Focus on the business value messaging throughout the demo—for example, highlighting metrics to track territory balance and ensure fair and manageable assignments, and showing how top-down and bottom-up planning can incorporate field feedback to create realistic and achievable targets.
- Prepare additional custom reporting dashboards to address known gaps in the out-of-the-box solution.
Key winning conversations and value messaging
- The T&Q app is built on years of Anaplan’s experience delivering T&Q solutions to over 100 customers—embedding industry best practices into the design.
- Positioned the app as a strong foundation, covering approximately 70–80% of the needed functionality out of the box, while allowing room for 20–30% customization to meet company-specific requirements. It’s not meant to be 100% perfect because we always know that we need to do some customization to fit each customer process better.
- Accelerate implementation and drive faster time-to-value—especially important for T&Q processes, which are time-sensitive and need to be ready for the next planning cycle (starting in September for next year for most companies). T&Q app is a great way to help them achieve target solution go live to leverage the solution for the next planning cycle.
- Positioned us as trusted experts in T&Q planning. We've implemented this process across many organizations, so we're not just here to replicate your current approach—we want to partner with you to co-design a future-state process, leveraging the solution as a foundation for best-practice transformation.
Objection handling and EB (economic buyer) access
Fit-gap analysis
Many customers want to understand how the app aligns with their existing processes, so it’s important to provide a detailed fit-gap analysis and have a honest discussion about where the app fits well and where it may require customization.
Things Not Included Out-of-the-Box
While certain features are not included in the out-of-the-box app, we’ve built them before for other Anaplan customers and know exactly how to implement them. The app provides a strong backbone with the core data model and structure in place, making it easy to layer on additional workflows, dashboards, and functionalities as needed.
Focus on business value:
T&Q is a use case that has direct impact on a company’s revenue. If accounts are not assigned correctly, you risk missing out on sales opportunities. If quotas are misaligned—either too high or too low—it can lead to missed targets or inflated performance that skews costs and projections.
There’s a broader value story behind T&Q planning. While the solution might seem like an additional cost, getting T&Q wrong could result in millions of dollars in lost or misallocated revenue.
How Anaplan differentiated itself from the competition
- The pre-built applications are a major differentiator. Very few solutions on the market offer true enterprise-grade T&Q functionality out of the box.
- Anaplan is the only platform that supports the full, end-to-end sales planning process—including account segmentation and scoring, capacity planning, territory and quota planning, sales forecasting, and incentive compensation. Most other tools, like Varicent or Xactly, are point solutions that only address one piece of the puzzle.
- Additional features like predictive insights and the Optimizer help enhance intelligence within the planning process—automating tasks such as territory assignment or predictive account scoring. PlanIQ further enables intelligent sales forecasting powered by AI. Again, very few solutions out there has predictive insights, Plan IQ and optimizer features for intelligent planning.
- Tools like Anaplan Excel Add-in (Anaplan XL) and ADO ensure seamless integration with external systems and Excel-based reporting needs.
Top 3 key take-aways
Strategic Demo That Tailored to Customer Needs
We tailored the T&Q app demo to reflect OneTrust’s current process, using it as both a product showcase and a live scoping session. The messaging focused on practical business value, while additional custom dashboards addressed key gaps—ensuring them that the solution will be the right fit.
Clear Value Story Built on Expertise and Accelerated Time-to-Value
By positioning the T&Q app as a best-practice framework (70–80% ready out-of-the-box with room for customization), we highlighted its ability to fast-track implementation and reduce risk—critical for time-sensitive sales planning cycles. Our experience implementing T&Q across many organizations helped establish credibility and trust.
Transparent Objection Handling and Strong Differentiation
We addressed fit concerns with an open fit-gap analysis and emphasized Anaplan’s extensibility beyond the base app. Anaplan stood out by offering true end-to-end sales planning with predictive insights, optimizer, and seamless integration tools, which few competitors can match.