Client Success: Digital Realty Implements Territory & Quota

Digital Realty Trust Inc (Digital Realty Trust) is a real estate investment service provider. The company acquires, owns, develops, and operates data centers and provides colocation and interconnection solutions. In recent years they experienced incredible growth as a company and that included growth within the sales organization.

Company Growth Comes with Change

With the quick growth Digital Realty experienced, it became increasingly difficult for the team to continue to manage the territory and quota-setting process manually. They wanted to build a process that was backed by data and more automated, and that required finding a tool. Prior to implementing an automated solution, they were sending spreadsheets by email around the world to complete the territory planning process, which was time-consuming and complex. This spreadsheet solution caused the following:

• Version Control Problems 
• Human Error
• Delays 
• Misalignment 

Digital Realty chose to implement Anaplan and chose Voiant as their consulting partner to assist in the project.

"Voiant was recommended to us by Anaplan. We interviewed the Voiant team a couple of times and looked for experience in specifically what we were doing in T&Q implementation, and we landed with a team that was just extraordinary." – Jim Slevin, Senior Director Go-to-Market Strategy & Analysis, Digital Realty.

The Start

The project began with building a business case for territory and quota setting and long-range planning. Digital Realty wanted to create streamlined processes for both use cases within a quick project turnaround. The business case was showcased through increased sales productivity, setting quotas earlier, and finalizing territories quicker. If the sales team has their quotas set quicker and territories assigned earlier, they have a longer time to do the required selling.  When there's more time to sell, sales productivity increases.

“Voiant came with a very well understood and mature project management approach.” – Jim Slevin, Senior Director Go-to-Market Strategy & Analysis, Digital Realty.

Enablement

One reason that this project was successful was that the Digital Realty team was very clear on what they wanted and needed out of the deployment. Upfront, both Digital Realty and the Voiant team spent a lot of time thinking about the UI and designing the solution to be as easy as possible for the participants that would actually be using it. Before rolling Anaplan out, there was a lot of enablement done and very clear team expectations set.

A Global Outcome

Anaplan was rolled out globally, and that has helped to foster continued global collaboration across countries as a tool like Anaplan is language agnostic.

A few more of the positive outcomes from this global deployment were:

• Better governance and controls
• Account scoring and segmentation built into the territory solution
• Process Streamlining
• Increased Sales Efficiency and Productivity

"My role here was to set unrealistic expectations, and the Voiant team repeatedly beat them. "

Jim Slevin, Senior Director Go-to-Market Strategy & Analysis, Digital Realty.