ServiceSource brings together business-critical planning processes in Anaplan

Repeat customers are the lifeblood of any business.Research by Adobeshows that though repeat customers account for only 8 percent of visitors to a typical e-commerce site, they generate 40 percent of all revenue. Statistics such as these are close to the heart of Mike Lemberg, VP of Finance at customer retention and growth specialist company ServiceSource, who shared some time with us at Hub16.

Through its Revenue-as-a-Service solutions and best-practice processes,ServiceSourcehelps the world’s leading B2B companies grow and retain revenue from existing customers. It’s been their sole focus for two decades, and today, they provide global deployments across 40 languages and 150 countries, typically integrating previously standalone processes to help companies drive customer adoption, expansion, and renewal.

Using Anaplan to unify enterprise planning

Lemberg shared that ServiceSource deployed Anaplan to unify two core processes, which are now consolidated in a corporate model. The first process is workforce planning, where Anaplan is used to plan, budget, and manage how thousands of ServiceSource employees are assigned to customer engagements around the world. The second Anaplan use case is the more traditional FP&A, used for planning, budgeting, and forecasting expenses incurred in R&D, SG&A, and professional services.

Unifying these two processes is critical as ServiceSource is predominantly a pay-for-performance company whose revenue is tied to their customers’ success. Therefore, it is imperative for ServiceSource to properly allocate field-based staff to ensure the they are delivering optimal outcomes for their customers.

Prescriptive FP&A tools do not cater for the complexities found in different use cases

Two years ago, ServiceSource realized it was time to replace its spreadsheets. Lemberg and his team set out evaluating which planning tools could support their vision. While other solutions could deliver basic planning and budgeting, it was quickly determined that they could not really cater to the complexities involved in workforce planning of its managed services business. Because of this, they could not support what ServiceSource wanted to do, which was to bring together two distinctly different use cases (workforce planning and FP&A) on a single platform.

Following a rapid implementation, Lemberg’s finance team now spends 80 percent of their time providing analytics and insights back to the business instead of manipulating data in spreadsheets. Additionally, Lemberg reports that providing business leaders across the business with better insight into how changes to staffing and operational models will impact the outcomes they deliver for their customers and the financial performance of ServiceSource.

Achieving breakthroughs in planning depends on bringing previously disparate processes together, just like ServiceSource has done. Hear more about ServiceSource’s transformation in arecent interview.

To find out how Anaplan can work for you,register for a personal demo, and take a deep dive into the processes that interest you most.