Take the Pain Out of Planning for Sales
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify common challenges inherent in sales planning processes.
- Explain how a comprehensive planning solution improves the likelihood of your sales teams reaching leadership goals.
- Describe how Sales Planning from Salesforce can improve your company’s sales planning processes.
Why Sales Planning Efforts Are So Challenging
If you support or manage a sales team, you’re likely familiar with the struggles around sales planning. It often occurs once or twice a year, partly because it’s an unpleasant, expensive, and arduous exercise.
But let’s review specifically what makes sales planning difficult among sales operations, management, and leadership.
- Lack of a single source of truth and manual processes.
- Inconsistent data among multiple systems and data sources for managing customer relationships, planning territories, and forecasting sales.
- Ill-defined sales goals, territories, and quotas.
- Poor collaboration and lack of accountability among contributors.
- Inability to plan for the market segments that can benefit from your company’s products and services.
- Leadership and staffing changes that disrupt the selling motion in established relationships.
Sales Planning Done Right
Is it too much to ask for a smoother sales planning experience? Maybe one that you can trust as your single source of truth? Salesforce offers a way to alleviate the common problems inherent during planning exercises.
Sales Planning, available as an add-on product in Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions, solves the problems that get in the way of creating effective sales plans. Here’s how.
|
Problem |
How Sales Planning from Salesforce Helps |
|---|---|
|
Data management pain points |
Your customer data in Salesforce is your single source of truth. Assign any of these records to your reps throughout your plan’s hierarchy.
And if your planning routine requires other data from third-party and proprietary systems, you get a comprehensive planning experience when you import that data into Sales Planning. |
|
Siloed efforts |
You get the right participation from stakeholders when you invite them to plan for specific hierarchy nodes. That way, you:
|
|
Lengthy sales planning processes |
Sales plan templates get you deep into the planning process quickly. Choose from templates that include:
Or design your sales plan entirely from scratch. |
|
Ill-defined targets and quotas |
Allocation and quota features help you:
|
|
Poorly planned territories |
Map-based design tools help you design strategic territories using Territory Planning, standard with your Sales Planning license. Plan territories that include:
|
Removing your sales planning obstacles gets your sales team aligned with leadership goals quickly. And housing all your planning data in a centralized system keeps you better organized, more at ease, and ready for adventures that matter to you.
Access to Sales Planning
If you’re tired of updating multiple spreadsheets, tracking down random files, and fighting to get participation from stakeholders, contact your Salesforce Account Executive. Together, you can determine whether Sales Planning can work well for you and your sales team. Get ready to reduce the pain in sales planning, and maybe even make it fun!