The Head Scratcher

As a pioneer in the category of Connected Planning, Anaplan’s platform enables dynamic, collaborative, and intelligent planning. After Anaplan’s top leadership made the strategic decision to focus on supporting the needs of the enterprise over small and midsize businesses, Anaplan’s sales and marketing teams knew they would need to change the way they approached their outreach to focus on their most engaged prospects. However, a lack of data-driven insights meant that prioritizing in-market accounts was impossible.

“Within our CRM systems, there wasn’t a way to prioritize our Tier 1 accounts,” said Xenia Escalante, Director of Marketing Operations at Anaplan. “The way we were going about prospecting was really arbitrary, and with 40,000 accounts, we had no way of narrowing down and focusing on our most engaged prospects.”

What’d They Do?

Anaplan incorporated Demandbase to power its Account-Based Marketing (ABM) program so that the sales team could know where to invest their time. “Our primary use of Demandbase is bridging sales and marketing communication so that our sales teams can really conceptualize what marketing activities are going on at their accounts and who’s engaging with them across the account,” said Colleen Jackson, ABM Marketing Manager at Anaplan.

Today, Anaplan uses Demandbase to provide its 300+ sales development representatives (SDRs) and account executives (AEs) visibility into account engagement. The ABM team relies on Demandbase to determine how many contacts they have for each Tier 1 account and to match new contacts as they come in, helping sales better understand the needs of each enterprise prospect and who within the buying committee to reach next.

How’d They Do?

Demandbase has vastly improved the way sales approaches outreach by giving SDRs the ability to look through a contact’s engagement history so they can target their pitch. Thanks to the increased insight Demandbase provides, the sales team now has more confidence in the quality of its contacts. “Within just the first two months, we noticed an uptick in sales engagement,” said Escalante. “Demandbase does for us what Anaplan does for our customers: It helps break down the silos between sales and marketing so we can collaborate better.”

From day one, Anaplan experienced a level of Demandbase adoption among its sales team that was unprecedented compared to other new tools. “I’ve never seen a platform so adopted, championed, or consumed by sales in the way Demandbase has been for us,” said Escalante.

• Anaplan experienced a 100% adoption rate of the Demandbase platform, with the first 95% occurring at the official rollout of the platform.
• 90% of their SDRs log into Demandbase weekly.
• In an internal survey, 87% of the sales team said they were satisfied or highly satisfied with Demandbase.