There is a pattern that plays out in almost every fast-growing midmarket company. The product is flying. Demand is accelerating. New channels, new markets, new customers. The commercial team is celebrating.
And somewhere in the background, the planning team is holding it all together with spreadsheets, workarounds, and a growing sense that this cannot continue.
The demand plan lives in Excel. Sales has a forecast that nobody in operations trusts. Finance has its own version of the numbers. Everyone is working hard. Nobody is working from the same data.
This is the moment where growing companies face a critical decision. And it is the moment where many of them get it wrong.
The point solution trap
The instinct, understandably, is to fix the most painful problem first. Demand planning is broken, so you buy a demand planning tool. Forecasting is unreliable, so you invest in a forecasting solution. The logic makes sense in the short term. The problem is what happens twelve months later.
You now have a demand tool that does not talk to your sales forecast. Your sales forecast is disconnected from your financial plan. Your commercial team is still working from a different set of assumptions. You have replaced one set of silos with a slightly more expensive set of silos.
The companies that scale successfully do something different. They start small, but they start connected. They choose a platform that allows them to solve the immediate problem, demand planning, while building the foundation to connect sales and finance over time. They do not try to do everything at once. But they make sure that whatever they build first can grow with them.
What connected actually means in practice
Connected planning is not a buzzword. It is the difference between plans that talk to each other and plans that don't. Your demand signal feeds directly into your sales forecast. Your commercial team's pipeline flows back into demand assumptions. Finance plans from the same numbers. One platform. One set of numbers. One shared planning foundation that finance, operations, and commercial teams all trust.
For midmarket companies growing at pace, this is not a luxury. It is what determines whether your planning function becomes a strategic asset or remains a bottleneck.
What to expect on June 11th, 2026
On June 11th, Keyrus and Anaplan are hosting an intimate breakfast at Anaplan's Netherlands office in Utrecht, designed specifically for demand planning leaders at midmarket companies who are navigating this exact challenge.
Keyrus is a global consulting firm specializing in data, artificial intelligence (AI), and enterprise performance management (EPM), with over 3,000 professionals across 28+ countries. We partner with organizations to elevate decision-making and create the space people need to think, decide, and lead.
The session will include a candid customer story from a European consumer goods company that went through this journey. They will share what triggered the need for change, how they partnered with Keyrus to move from Excel-based silos to connected demand and sales planning, and why starting small and earning trust across the business was critical to making it stick.
Beyond the customer perspective, the morning will cover the practical question of why demand, sales, and finance need to sit on a single platform, and what that means for companies that are growing too fast to keep planning the way they always have. Short, focused presentations will set the stage for the most valuable part of the morning: the roundtable discussion.
This will be a small, facilitated conversation where attendees can share their own challenges and hear how other businesses at a similar stage are tackling them. No pitches. Straightforward presentations followed by an honest conversation between people facing the same problems.
Who this is for
This session is built for directors, COOs, and transformation leaders at midmarket businesses that are growing quickly and starting to feel the strain on their demand planning processes. If your demand planning still lives in spreadsheets, if your commercial team and your finance team are working from different numbers, or if you have already invested in point solutions and are starting to see the limitations, this is a morning worth blocking out.
It is about creating the space to think, decide, and lead, instead of chasing numbers across disconnected tools.
The session runs from 09:00 to 11:00 at the Anaplan office in Utrecht. Breakfast is included. The group will be kept small to make sure the conversation is useful.