Amer Sports scores a win with sales and compensation planning

Sporting goods company revamps target-setting worldwide and aligns local sales targets with global expectations

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Amer Sports oversees some of the world’s leading sporting goods brands, including Arc’teryx, Atomic, Mavic, Salomon, Suunto, and Wilson. With so many brands to manage, setting consistent targets that could handle the seasonal swings in sales was no mere pastime. By consolidating targets worldwide using the Anaplan platform, Amer Sports standardized target-setting around the globe, instituted best practices, and restructured its sales team to create smarter, more specialized sales roles. With Anaplan, Amer Sports now hits its goals.
We’ve estimated a 70% reduction in time spent target-setting. This has freed up our field sales managers to spend more time with their sales teams and their customers.
Global Sales Development Manager

70%

reduction in time spent target-setting

17

countries’ data consolidated

40 day

implementation time

  • SOLUTIONS

    Sales & Marketing

  • INDUSTRIES

    Consumer Goods & Retail

A global company that oversees some of the world’s most well-known sporting goods brands, Amer Sports struggled with setting sales targets and rewarding salespeople consistently across its many brands and regions. As the company grew and diversified, it wanted to standardize target-setting so that local targets met global sales objectives, and revamp his team to address the company’s diverse customer base.

In the past, all sales planning and compensation management was done locally on spreadsheets, some of which had grown so large that they took seven minutes to open. There was no way to confirm the accuracy of the data, consolidate data across regions, or view global performance by brand or season.

Working alongside the Anaplan services team, Amer Sports built and launched its initial Anaplan for Sales model in under 40 business days. The model allowed the Amer Sports team to construct sales targets, create incentive plans, and calculate bonuses for sales people worldwide. The model also ensured that consolidated bottom-up sales targets set locally would always align with top-down expectations.

Anaplan also enabled Amer Sports to create multiple new sales roles, knowing that each role would automatically inherit the appropriate quota and compensation plan. This helped Amer Sports transition the team into more specialized jobs, including area sales managers, smart service sales reps, visual merchandisers, and tech reps.

Using Anaplan, Amer Sports reduced the time it spent on target-setting by an estimated 70 percent. Planning processes that previously took one week now take less than one day. Because Anaplan automatically compiles data from multiple sources, Amer Sports no longer needs analysts in each country to extract data from the company’s SAP system and rework it into spreadsheets.

Other benefits include:

  • Sales targets are standardized globally
  • Sales data is viewable across multiple dimensions, including territory, brand, account, and season
  • Sellers use predictive analytics to forecast projected compensation earnings
  • Sales roles easily realigned to accommodate new selling strategies

Amer Sports selected Anaplan for its flexibility in handling complex information and its ability to implement consistency across dispersed teams and locations. The company is looking for ways to extend their solutions and anticipates building a territory-planning model. The team lives by the mantra of setting “demanding but achievable targets” and insists that because the Anaplan platform is so flexible, anything is possible.