Key Aspects of Sales Planning
As we have made very clear in the past, gone are the days of static planning. Businesses cannot afford to be caught off guard as changing business environments send company plans out the window and this has only been made more clear by the recent Coronavirus Pandemic. The same must be said for how you manage your sales teams.
While company FP&A teams adapt financial plans, sales teams must adapt too. Sales planning refers to the many operations that revolve around managing a sales team. From outlining quotas to defining sales territories, there is a lot that goes into this management, and if these actions are not in line with company goals and activities then there will be a serious problem.
Goal Setting
Sales Planning starts from the top. Before any sales operations can be made there must be a high level plan for your organization. This plan spans across time, region, product, and other market segments that are relevant to your company. These goals will drive both current revenue and future growth and must be both challenging and obtainable.
Sales Capacity Planning
Sales Capacity planning ensures that your business has the capacity to execute your plan. This is often done at a sales representative level. This type of planning looks at individual representatives’ revenue earned and compares these metrics with current and future goals. In other words, sales capacity planning quantifies the abilities of your sales teams.
Set Quotas and Territories
An important part of sales planning is understanding how to motivate and compensate your employees. This is done through a number of different processes. Once a goal has been set by your organization it is up to the sales managers to set a quota that is in line with that goal. Too high and your employees won’t be motivated, too low and teams become complacent. One aspect of quotas is territory planning. By clearly spelling out specific territories quotas can be defined based on the opportunities available to the members assigned there.
Incentive Plans
Once these quotas and territories are outlined, sales incentive plans can be created. These plans detail how, when, and how much an employee with variable sales will be paid. Sales compensation plans are relevant when discussing sales plans as many sales representatives have variable levels of compensation based on commission.
Sales Forecasting
In order to maintain an effective sales plan, you must be constantly updating your sales forecast. Linking your sales plan to your enterprise performance management software is an effective way to do this. This will ensure transparency and accuracy in your sales plan as well as avoid unreasonable quotas.
Maintaining Your Plan
Once you have the system in place, it is now up to the management teams to ensure that your plan works. With time, managers will be able to pick up on trends and develop understandings in order to effectively lead your sales teams. Make sure you use tools that allow for this flexibility.
Sales Planning Challenges & Mistakes
There are a number of factors that can play a role in limiting the success of your sales planning operation. The first and often most costly mistake is that the overall company goals and objectives are not captured or clear in sales plans. This problem can result from one of two mistakes.
Sales Planning Mistake #1: Unclear Goals
The first mistake is that the executive team creates a plan without clearly stated goals. This produces an unfocused sales plans without a clear path forward. Unclear or out of date sales plans are not able to capture the current goals set forward by the executive team. This results in lost revenue, slower planning cycles, and overall inefficient company operations.
Sales Planning Mistake #2: Siloed Spreadsheets
The next challenge arises from how most sales teams create their sales plans. Typically, most sales teams begin planning in siloed spreadsheets. These spreadsheets have two main weaknesses. The first is that they provide limited collaboration. When one employee changes their spreadsheet, no one else is able to see the changes they made or how it affects a business. These siloed spreadsheets cause hours of consolidation and time wasted before any decisions can be made. Furthermore, these spreadsheets are not often complex enough to make accurate predictions surrounding quotas, territory planning, and other real time calculations.
Poor sales planning can result in a number of problems such as frustrated salespeople, unwanted attrition, longer on-ramping time for new hires, and missed targets. All the while executives are not able to see the impact of changes to their strategies and adjust sales targets based on sales potential.
Benefits and Opportunities
Enterprises need real-time insight into the state of their business to plan strategically across the organization and to execute their sales plan effectively and track performance metrics. Sales Planning includes balancing many complexities, such as setting equitable quotas, managing territories, planning for the future, coordinating across HR and finance to appropriately staff sales resources, and monitoring plans against results. All of these actions allow for a scalable process that will bring accelerated growth to your organization.
The main benefit of sales planning is the ability to use an integrated platform to connect business metrics. As businesses integrate across their organization, it should expect to see significant improvements in the ability to both manage and be forward thinking. This is done with options such as what if planning scenarios, and collaborative decision making and through the single source of truth provided with an integrated solution. Assuming it is implemented and managed properly. adding sales planning to your enterprise planning network will:
- Optimize target market coverage to maximize revenue
- Enable proactive management of the sales strategy
- Connect your sales plan with the financial plan to see the impact of changes in workforce
- Enable the ability to make changes in the sales plan components and see the impact on the financial outcomes
- Allow for the running of scenarios and what-if analysis to adapt quickly to changing business needs
- Provide automation and scalability with rule-based account segmentation and territory planning to handle huge volumes of data pertaining to accounts, opportunities, leads, compensation, firmographic information, and more
- Help determine when and where salespeople need to be added and the skills required during the year
- Offer change management capabilities with the ability to monitor how plans continuously change with evolving business needs
With an effective sales plan in place you can expect to see a systematic change to your organization. Executives will be able to track collaborative progress from a high level all the while providing an opportunity to track individual quotas and territories to adequately designate resources and close sales.
Workday Adaptive Planning for Sales
Workday Adaptive Planning provides a robust solution that brings a single source of truth into your decision making. Workday Adaptive Planning for sales allows sales operations teams to continuously plan, run what-if scenarios, get visibility into sales performance, and collaborate within the sales team and with other business stakeholders. The platform is also scalable in order to grow with the needs of the organization. Workday also provides a number of different use cases to provide a versatile and dynamic planning solution. Connecting your sales plan to your financial plan will provide a multitude of different insights to your business that were never before imaginable.
How QBIX Can Help
In order to get the most out of your Workday solution, it is important that you start on the right foot. There are a number of new things to learn when implementing new sales compensation software, as well as some best practices that may not be clear on your own. With the help of an implementation specialist like QBIX, your business can make a seamless transition to your new planning methods all the while having a team of experts to help your organization adjust. Schedule a call with the QBIX team today and discover the hidden opportunities in your data.