Specialist
Former C-level executive at Anaplan Inc
Agenda
- Operating environment for Anaplan (NYSE: PLAN) and the broader connected planning segment
- Competitive positioning and ability to displace legacy vendors – why does Anaplan win or lose evaluations?
- Product expansion, partner strategy and end markets contributing to future growth
- Outlook for Q4 2021 and beyond, including NRR (net revenue retention) expansion and management additions
Questions
1.
Could you outline Anaplan’s operating environment and any key trends that you think investors should monitor?
2.
Could you size the TAM that Anaplan is competing for? Where would you ballpark penetration and growth rates across its target customer base?
3.
How would you quantify the serviceable addressable market across Anaplan’s business lines? Is it better to unpack the penetration ability and growth rate within each individual end market, so within financial planning, supply chain planning, sales and so on?
4.
How sustainable do you think demand and adoption levels are from the pandemic tailwind? Companies seem to be upping their IT spend at least in part due to pent-up demand, so do you expect any slowdown in various customer or product segments? Could this be fairly sustainable in the aggregate?
5.
What competitive dynamics are at play across Anaplan, legacy vendors such as Oracle and SAP and players such as Workday and OneStream? Who would you say is Anaplan’s major competitive threat and how would you describe the company’s relative positioning?
6.
How much remaining market share can players such as Anaplan and OneStream take from legacy vendors such as Oracle and SAP? What is the newer players’ longer-term opportunity, and how long could the legacy players provide a customer pool for Anaplan to target?
7.
Why did you describe Anaplan as its own worst enemy? How does the company pose an execution risk to itself?
8.
What may be contributing to management turnover at the head of sales level? How could Anaplan improve this retention and establish a steady leadership that can run the sales motion more consistently?
9.
Why would Anaplan win out over vendors such as OneStream or vice versa in an evaluation? What stands out to customers and how does Anaplan compare?
10.
Do customers tend to standardise on one platform in cases where Anaplan wins, or would they use a best of-breed approach for different use cases?
11.
How do you assess Anaplan’s product moat and how its strategy plays into the company’s overall strength, especially considering new releases such as PlanIQ and its use of AI and machine learning?
12.
Could Anaplan enter the consolidation segment organically or through M&A to expand the product offering longer term, given OneStream’s success here? Could the company make a play there or would it rather stick to its bread-and-butter use cases?
13.
What could be Anaplan’s greatest risks and opportunities around product, and how could those considerations factor into the company’s s longer-term roadmap? Do you expect it to continue focusing on the core platform and use PlanIQ as an upsell opportunity, or could it develop other tangential products?
14.
How do you expect Anaplan’s go-to-market strategy to play out under the leadership of new Chief Marketing Officer Brett Theiss and Chief Revenue Officer Bill Schuh? Could the mix of direct vs partner sales stay consistent or could there be a greater emphasis on the inside sales team? The company’s partner network is strong and has been leveraged by Anaplan to win most of its new deals. How do you assess the company’s ability to penetrate various customer segments?
15.
What could be the impact of launching Anaplan on Google Cloud? How could the company’s partner strategy with cloud providers such as GCP and AWS evolve to expand the customer base?
16.
Anaplan has around 1,750 customers. How high could this climb in the next few years? What is the mix of customers between large enterprises and the mid-market, if some of the bigger players here are using it, and domestic vs international, given that international contributes around 45% of revenue? How is the geographic split trending and do you expect North America or international to outweigh the other?
17.
Anaplan’s revenue is split roughly 60/40 between finance and the rest of the offering. How could this trend as customer adoption of non-finance service lines picks up? Do you expect finance to keep pace and the 60/40 split to remain stable, or could product line diversification increase?
18.
Anaplan grew revenue 36% YoY in Q2 FY22, obviously contextualising this against a relatively weaker 2020, but its guidance for Q3 growth is in the mid-20s. Why is the company projecting a slowdown? Is this more modest guidance due to the new CFO or to the actual strength of the business?
19.
Anaplan achieved great results from its existing base in the past quarter, posting 119% NRR [net revenue retention] with 71% of new bookings coming from existing customers. Would you attribute this 71% more to strong upsell and cross-sell motions or potentially weaker new logo additions?
20.
What would you say is a reasonable upper bound for Anaplan’s NRR? The highest number in recent memory was 123% for FY19. Could the company return to this level through increased upsell and cross-sell? What are the hurdles to achieving this?
21.
What would you say is Anaplan’s greatest risk or opportunity in light of the company’s performance, the new management additions and various market factors? How do those factors inform your best- and worst case scenarios for the company?
