Anaplan is a transformative way to see, plan, and run your business. Using its proprietary Hyperblock™ technology, Anaplan lets you contextualize real-time performance, and forecast future outcomes for faster, confident decisions. Anaplan enables connected strategy and planning across your enterprise to move your business forward. Based in San Francisco, Anaplan has over 200 partners and more than 2,000 customers worldwide.
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Spiff
Score 8.9 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Spiff headquartered in Sandy offers their sales commission engine and automation platform, providing a personalized performance dashboard for individual contributors, commission plan building tools, approval workflow for commission plans, and integrations with payment (e.g. Stripe, Paypal), as well as CRMs and ERP systems.
Anaplan revolutionizes the planning process by standardizing it, creating transparency in data, particularly in showcasing results to the management team. By replacing Excel-centric planning methods, Anaplan not only opens the door to handling larger datasets but also enables a more intricate level of data granularity at an accelerated pace. What sets it apart is its capacity to facilitate a seamless collaboration within a cross-functional model, accommodating diverse departments and business functions in a dynamic, real-time environment.
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.
The "new" UX front-end offers a lot of modern and intuitive features, but it lacks the ability to view multiple "tabs" of dashboards and reports. The "classic" dashboard had this feature but now with the UX, you need to be really smart about how to design a single page where the users won't get "lost".
Lacks the ability to "wrap text" (similar to excel) and auto-size grid rows
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.
In any line of work, a tool that is flexible and would allow different departments of your company to easily interact and exchange valuable insights, is highly anticipated and needed. For me, what Anaplan provides to a business, be it a smaller one or an enterprise customer, is an easily scaling, agile planning and modeling platform that can meet almost any need and give a high-end solution to the problems any company faces on a daily basis.
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
There is a dependency in this rating - in that I find Anaplan extremely easy to use, but I've spent the necessary time developing a strong understanding of the platform. Once you understand how to use it, the platform is flexible, easy to use, and fun to use.
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
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.
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.
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.
1. Anaplan has separate 24/7 customer support channel to help with queries, 2. Customer Partner from Anaplan to support vendor with their queries like license purchase, use case implementation support, customer advocacy 3. Anaplan Learning Platform to help learning new product features free of cost and Yearly Anaplan connect across globe to share success stories of various companies.
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.
The in-person training is simply not worth the cost. After a few weeks of playing in Anaplan, I went to the basic training and knew more than the person teaching it. a year down the road, I was the first person to complete the advance training, and again could have been teaching the class better than the person running the session. Spend some time on your own trying out different things and you will get all the understanding you need to be successful.
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.
Agile methodology and breaking the work down into sprints was very helpful. Implementation required a deeper dive into our data than expected for the consultants to be able to construct the data model. But once it was in place, the focus on knowledge transfer enabled us to be able to use the product effectively after the team rolled off.
Anaplan is what I would consider a modeling platform. It excels at taking a forecasting or planning process and systematizing it - and allowing for whatever nuances and granularity you need to perform that modeling. It is not positioned as "data collection" platform - which are typically designed to take data uploads from Excel to calculate basic opex and revenue models. It's much more customizable and flexible.
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.
We have managed to leverage Anaplan for financial planning and forecasting across the business. It is now used by almost every department, with more than 50 users (but I know of companies that have hundreds of users) and still the platform is quick and reliable. It is easy to make changes to divisions and departments or add users and apply different user settings - the core part of the model is not affected and end users can continue their work without any disruption
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.
Speeding up the process of closing and updating the current month forecast
Reduced work on the preparation of reports and presentations. We used different Anaplan approaches with varying success, but the overall result was there.
It's hard to gauge, but the overall increase in process and algorithm transparency, along with data protection, has given an excellent platform for scaling up the company's processes.
This has increased our turn around time and expense in preparing commission payments
This has allowed us to decrease expense related to processing commissions
This has increased transparency within the sales teams but at the same time, alot of individuals are overwhelmed with the amount of visibility. There really is a fine line on what is to much for some people.
