Alex Handsaker. Image: Clevenue
Founded last year in the UK, Clevenue is a platform that helps sales team execute business planning without the need for complex Excel sheets.
“The days of spreadsheet planning and building Excel models is dead,” says Alex Handsaker, co-founder of Clevenue, a software platform to help sales teams build revenue and go-to-market plans quickly and easily. “It’s a completely different approach to planning.”
According to Handsaker, who describes himself as an engineer-turned-revenue-obsessive, sales teams have historically been planned out by establishing a target, calculating the number of salespeople needed and dividing the target by how much a salesperson is targeted to bring in – all easy to do using a spreadsheet.
“This approach was especially prevalent in investor-backed software-as-a-service businesses, and back in the world of growth at all costs, this was an accepted approach that worked (at least to the goal of generating revenue),” Handsaker tells SiliconRepublic.com.
“Once the excess of demand started drying up however, it left swathes of businesses missing targets until disaster, or the need for layoffs hit.”
This is where what is known as a ‘bottom-up’ approach to planning comes in, which Handsaker describes as a highly iterative and time-consuming process that can get “wildly complex” in a spreadsheet.
“By building plans from the bottom up, businesses are able to maximise the utilization of their teams, and drive more capital efficient paths to growth, something that the industry is now driving towards,” he explains.
“On top of this, the impact of changes to the plan become far more evident, so when you combine this approach with live data it becomes an invaluable tool for strategic decision-making.”
Disrupting business planning
Founded last year in the UK, Clevenue helps businesses do exactly this without the need for excel sheets. Using the platform, sales teams can build and stress-test revenue and go-to-market plans to test a range of eventualities, from economic headwinds to growing into new markets.
Handsaker co-founded Clevenue with Craig Bryant and Ste Errington, who together run the business remotely. Handsaker and Bryant are former colleagues who helped a fast-growing marketing-tech company scale rapidly before being laid off like many others recently.
“We couldn’t believe how simplistic the approach to planning was across the tech industry, especially given that companies lived or died by their ability to generate revenue – often relying on downloaded spreadsheet templates to paint a picture of growth to investors, one that would often never materialise,” Handsaker says.
Along with Bryant, he says he felt the human cost of this approach because when businesses committed to a target, they not only hired sales teams, they also hired computer science, engineering, operations and finance roles to build for and look after the promised customers.
“When the revenue doesn’t follow, it’s not just sales that are surplus to requirements,” he explains. “This was why we started our mission towards powering more sustainable company growth, finally putting a price on growth at all costs.”
After building an initial prototype to gain feedback on “disrupting planning”, Handsaker and Bryant met Errington, an experienced full-stack developer who understood what they were trying to do and translated the models into a full-fledged platform.
The ultimate objective, according to Handsaker, is to create a “fundamental shift” in the way people approach business planning, where instead if end-of-year planning cycles, there’s a leaner and more agile approach.
“With a more flexible approach to planning, less money is wasted on decisions simply because they were in the plan and instead focused more on what is the right move right now,” he says.
“Ultimately, accurate planning results in better outcomes, and better outcomes lead to more job security and less layoffs.”
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