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. Accounts Contacts Leads 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: Delegate responsibility for those nodes and their descendents. Encourage stakeholders to focus on and plan for just their areas of responsibility. Give stakeholders flexibility to collaborate with their peers without having to get a distributed team together in one place. Get stakeholder investment in and accountability for the outcomes of their areas in the plan.
Lengthy sales planning processes	Sales plan templates get you deep into the planning process quickly. Choose from templates that include: Hierarchies, rules, and assignments from Enterprise Territory Management. Your established role hierarchy and account assignments in Salesforce. A hierarchy based on manager field values from accounts in Salesforce. Sample data to get you familiar with common planning scenarios. Or design your sales plan entirely from scratch.
Ill-defined targets and quotas	Allocation and quota features help you: Distribute quota based on your metrics. Gather bottoms-up feedback from reps and managers when they plan attainment using Quota Attainment Planning, standard with your Sales Planning license. Set targets for business units in your hierarchy.
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: Boundaries such as postal codes, states, or countries. Record assignments with distributed ownership based on the criteria you determine. Areas that align with leadership’s priorities from the top down or the bottom up.

 

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! 

Resources

• Salesforce Site: Sales Planning Demo
• Salesforce Help: Sales Planning Implementation Guide