Anaplan vs. Salesforce Spiff

Anaplan is best suited for strategic planning initiatives in industries like CPG, Manufacturing, FS, Pharma. It can handle multiple use cases for each function in the company like Supply chain, Finance, Sales and more. It is one of the best tools I have seen in scenario modelling. It is not suitable for very detailed level planning, essentially execution level eg. Production scheduling.

Spiff can serve well organizations that regularly pay OTE and performance-based incentives as it takes away the pain for users to track their OTE pay. It is also very convenient to access past reports for comparison or whatever purpose you may need it for. The build-in ticketing system also allows users to easily raise inquiries and for admins to have a single inbox for inquiries that they need to address.

Incentivized

• Anaplan can scale as your business grows, for example adding new regions into to your geographical hierarchy.
• Anaplan is flexible and can do anything you want it to, there are no tables pre-configured that you need to fix your business process into.
• Reading formulas in Anaplan is straight forward with a quick learning curve.

• It syncs with your internal systems to show how much you have sold during the current period.
• It tells you how much you should expect to get paid based on your sales.
• It keeps track of how you have performed over the course of the year and tells you when you are in accellerators.
• It also details your organizations sales rules and payout rules so that you just have one place to go for all questions commission related.

Incentivized

• Ability to decide if to apply the formula or a manual input on front end for each line item
• Real Time Data Transfer across models. Currently Data is transferred using Processes across different models. Having a functionality to access data from any model in real time would be great

• Although reporting has been improved, it's an area that I feel could use more development (which they are doing).
• Exports are good but to make them great, being able to customize the formatting and data that shows and which data doesn't show would be a great improvement.
• The backend can be somewhat confusing with statements and obligations and which should be used when and so on, just as one example. With that being said they are very willing to teach and also just do the updates for you if needed, but if it was a little more intuitive without that help would make it better.

Incentivized

Anaplan is a very strong multi-dimensional modeling tool that provides a calculation engine to empower a complex planning process. It is fairly easy to learn for those with experience in similar tools, or excel. It forces structure and auditability that spread sheets do not have, along with extensive security capabilities

I enjoy using it and it is easy to see where you stand, the issue is still no live tracking, or at the very least, twice daily updates. You have the update in the morning, but I would like to see where I stand at the end of the day as well

Incentivized

Anaplan is interesting because it is at the same time easy to use and difficult to use. An end user can navigate a well-constructed app, being pointed in the right direction every time they feel a slight bit of confusion, and find everything they need in what feels like a straight line. Similarly, a model builder (developer of sorts) can have the exact same experience, but the journey is longer and more complicated. End users have great experiences with Anaplan, but sometimes model builders have a frustrating one. That is not to say model building is hard (because it truly is not), but things change, and when things change in complex systems, the effort required simply to investigate where a model builder needs to make an adjustment may frustrate them but also frustrate their non-technical bosses. However, the reality is that with complicated businesses, complicated business problems, come complicated solutions. It is actually a testament to Anaplan's capabilities that it has taken on the biggest problems at the biggest companies. It may be daunting to adjust it in those environments, but at least you know it did meet the needs there, which is more than most tools can say.

Overall, the use cases of Spiff have been helping us to address important problems when it comes to commission calculation: (1) Accuracy of the commission calculation, (2) Transparency over how the commission is calculated, (3) Automation of commission calculation, which in turn saves us significant amount of time and energy and allow us to focus more on more important tasks

Incentivized

There are very few outages. Maintenance is scheduled on two or three Saturdays per month, so as not to affect businesses. When there is an outage, users are kept informed of progress to restore the platform and typically this takes no more than an hour. Anaplan customer support is very responsive if we ever have questions about platform issues

In all my time using Spiff, I only recall it being unoperational (outside the times when there is scheduled maintence. During those times, Spiff does a good job at communicating when their services will be offline and why). The times when I do get a small error, 9 times out a 10 a simple refresh of the browser will fix the issue.

Incentivized

Everything is calculated in memory in the cloud. It's nearly instantaneous updates when you make changes. The only time things get a little slow is when you have a massive model with very intricate calculations...but "slow" for Anaplan is not what I would call "slow" for something like Hyperion. We used to have Hyperion calcs that ran for 60 mins before you could use data. The equivalent would be 60 seconds in Anaplan.

Incentivized

Pages load quickly, dashboards update numerous times throughout the day, and the integrations are seamless and operate without a hitch. On occasion, commissions will be delayed in calculating corrctly by a day or so, but that is quite rare. I don't find that delay to be a huge hinderance anyways.

Incentivized

Support quality has dropped since Thoma Bravo has taken over. I think some serious re-focus needs to happen here -- part of the beauty of being in the Anaplan community was how involved you felt in it before. Before I didn't dread sending a support ticket, now I am starting to.

I needed my account to be set up and there seemed to be some technical issues with onboarding and a customer service rep made herself immediately available to liaison with our IT department to get me up and running. I did not expect them to tend to our request with such urgency.

In my opinion, in-person training is always the best if you have the option to do so. This allows real-time interactions with the instructions, whereas the online training I took required me to write-down questions, email them, and wait for responses. This slows down the process, as you can imagine. That said, in-person training is an extra cost and it likely isn't needed for everyone. I would suggest selecting a small number of people to take in-person training and then having them act as mentors to the rest of your team. That way, as the rest of the team takes the online training, they have a resource to help them in real time.

Anaplan training materials are clear, simple, easy to understand and to follow. Visuals are excellent. The vendor is good at updating training materials in a timely manner and encouraging users and administrators to keep coming back to Academy site for refresher courses or new feature courses. I really like their interactive diagrams

The training was conducted by our Spiff Account Manager and they would even create recorded videos we could send to the sales team so when they log in, they would understand how to use Spiff. Account managers at Spiff are a huge reason why I like that company.

Incentivized

The platform allows a flexible implementation mechanic to be put in place, since the possibilities and functionalities are vast and there are very few things the tool cannot do well. The solutions for the financial planning and the integrated business planning we put in place were easily adopted by the end users and their day-to-day work was made easier.

I wasnt invovled but I heard it went smoothly!

Incentivized

Anaplan and these other tools are very similar. I cannot say that I selected Anaplan over them as I have worked with and been involved with setting up a number of tools for clients. They all have their advantages and Anaplan is a very strong tool in the cloud planning space

It is a night and day difference between Sheets and Excel. The fact that it is integrated with Salesforce and calculates commission as you close deals make it super transparent and efficient when it comes to tracking your performance and commission. Spiff takes the manual work out of the equation. Reduces human error and increases collaboration.

Incentivized

The platform is highly flexible and can be deployed across multiple departments and locations, supporting growth and varying business needs effectively. Its cloud-based architecture allows for scaling model size and user access as required. However, there can be some challenges with performance and model complexity as the scale increases significantly, which slightly limits its scalability in very large or highly complex environments.

We have a fairly large Enterprise sales team (200+ people and growing). Back when I first started at my organization this number was actually around 100 people. We've doubled in size since then and we have had zero problems adding these additional users.

Incentivized

• Anaplan's implementation led to a significant reduction in planning cycle errors and bugs, streamlining processes and improving overall accuracy in data inputs
• Standardizing the planning process and enabling cross-functional collaboration through Anaplan enhanced our ability to adapt swiftly to changing business needs, resulting in improved agility in decision-making
• The platform's capabilities, especially in Demand Planning and Supply Chain, positively impacted our ROI by optimizing resource allocation and solving complex business problems efficiently across multiple functions

• increased transparency, allows me to share with my boss where i am at, i dont have to create a separate document tracking this information myself
• Reassurance on payout and accuracy, i know what is in Salesforce Spiff is already approved and directly translates to the payout of my goals
• reduction in errors and improved/less communication with the finance team for payouts. no other conversation needs to happen

Incentivized