Customer Awards, New Planful Champions, Marketing Workshops Highlight Day 1 of Perform23

Today’s kickoff of Planful Perform23 featured an all-star team of financial performance management players. FP&A, accounting, and workforce planning teams heard specialized roundtable sessions, marketing teams had two 2-hour workshops to attend, and our customer advisory groups met for extended in-person sessions.

Most importantly, we welcomed new members into the Planful Champions Club and presented our 2023 Planful Customer Awards in the categories of Innovation, Team Sport, Rookie of the Year, and Advocacy. Here’s a quick recap of today’s Planful Perform23 events.

We were very excited to announce the 11 new members of the Planful Champions Club, an exclusive program that lets the best and brightest of Planful customers, partners, and employees promote their skills and expertise to colleagues, peers, and others in the financial performance management community.

Membership certifies exceptional technical proficiency on the Planful platform or enthusiastic advocacy for Planful solutions. Benefits include private events, access to training materials, access to a private network of Planful experts, digital badges to promote accomplishments, and more. Check out this post for more information on the Planful Champions Club.
And now, the new members of the Planful Champions Club announced at Perform23 are…

Planful Customers

• Russ Bonilla, Vice President, Finance at Merchants Fleet
• Ben Del Rio, Director of FP&A at Chugach Corporation
• Luis Martinez Luna, Senior Manager, FP&A at Rocket Software
• Tracy Palliser, FP&A Manager of Internal Financial Reporting at Milestone Equipment Holdings
• Talyon Perry, Senior FP&A Analyst at Togetherwork
• Lisa Turberville, Manager, Financial Planning and Analysis at Electric Power Research Institute

Planful Partners

• Amy Kriete, Consultant at CFO Solutions
• Joe Martins, Senior Consultant at CFO Solutions
• Sergio Natividade, Managing Consultant at RSM UK
• Andrew Onufrychuk, Manager at Keyrus

Planful Employees

• Kevin Lawrence, Customer Success Manager at Planful

Congratulations to these and all the existing members of the Planful Champions Club.

We really enjoy showcasing our customers’ stories, both at Perform23 and on our aptly named Customer Stories page. But, when customers do something spectacular, we like to shout it out to the world and recognize their MVP efforts.

On day 1 of Perform23, we announced five new customer award winners in the categories of innovation, team sport, rookie of the year, and advocacy. And the winners are…

Innovation: Rocket Software

The innovation category celebrates a customer using Planful in innovative and creative ways for expansive results, such as global impact, unique applications, xP&A or operational use cases, and more. Rocket Software was chosen for its creative use of Planful for Human Resources as it redefined its workforce strategy to support business goals across different time horizons and a volatile labor market.

Team Sport: Merchants Fleet, Arcadia

The team sport category celebrates a customer using Planful to approach financial performance management as a team sport by collaborating across the business. Merchants Fleet was selected for its perseverance through internal change while still automating reporting, budget, and rolling forecasts, plus its use of Planful Predict and achieving significant reductions in financial process cycle times. Arcadia was selected for using Planful to deliver actionable insights for its healthcare customers as it advances care and research, drives strategic growth, and achieves peak financial performance.

Rookie of the Year: Zappos

The rookie of the year category celebrates a customer new to Planful in 2022 that deployed and launched quickly and soon realized value while driving adoption across the business. Zappos was selected for its speedy implementation, strong buy-in from the wider business, and a fast adoption of Planful.

Advocacy: TogetherWork

The advocacy category celebrates a customer demonstrating significant impact as a Planful advocate by joining reference calls, participating in analyst relations activities, providing product feedback, and supporting marketing activities. TogetherWork was selected for the strong advocacy of Talyon Perry, the company’s Sr. FP&A Analyst, who championed the Planful Platform through implementation. Talyon has been an extremely helpful advocate to prospective customers, has provided Planful with important feedback through peer-to-peer reviews, and has devoted time to discussing the company’s use of Planful with industry analysts.

Congratulations to Togetherwork, Zappos, Merchants Automotive Group, Arcadia, and Rocket Software! Representatives from each of the winners accepted the awards yesterday at Perform23 in Chicago.

Ever since we added marketing performance management to the Planful Platform, customers new and existing have been thrilled to explore the seamless collaboration it enables between finance and marketing teams. Trailblazing CFOs and CMOs have been clamoring for more ways to drive more opportunities for business growth across the organization, and Planful for Marketing brings that — and more!

Perform23 is our first event showcasing Planful for Marketing. Scott Todaro, VP, Marketing Performance Management Solutions at Planful, and co-author of The Next CMO: A Guide to Operational Marketing Excellence, jumped headlong into the first half of four marketing-specific workshops being offered at Perform23. Each two-hour workshop provides interactive, hands-on training to help marketers create an operational marketing powerhouse.

Perform23 day 1 saw Scott hosting the following workshops:

• “How to Build an Operational Marketing Plan” trained attendees on a proven methodology for building agile, goals-based marketing plans that will deliver tangible ROI. They learned how to align and calculate the right metrics, develop marketing strategies for achieving goals, build results-based marketing campaigns, and allocate the right amount of budget to achieve goals.
• “How To Execute Your Operational Marketing Plan” provided tips and tricks for getting the most return on marketing budget and calculating marketing ROI, profit, and LTV. Attendees then went hands-on with Planful for Marketing to demonstrate execution best practices and learn how to execute campaigns, optimize marketing budgets, and speak the language of finance to better align marketing and finance teams.

On day 2 of Perform23, Scott will deliver the second duo of workshops on “How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Marketing” and “ How to Lead an Operational Marketing Team.”

We’ll be back with a recap of days 2 and 3 of Perform23, the year’s marquee event for learning how to turn financial performance management into a team sport at any organization.