EPM Sales Planning Cloud

Sales Planning - "What you plan now, you will harvest later!" - Og Mandino, Author of The Greatest Salesman in the World

Sales planning is about allocating resources, aligning markets, and managing quotas to attain strategic goals by leveraging resources, capabilities, and opportunities. The strategy is executed by resources on the ground level, so it is crucial that the leadership sets achievable-stretch goals by considering drivers such as customer behaviors, market trends, and demographics. An organization is setting itself for failure if reps are not optimistic about their targets or if markets are over or underserved. In theory, it sounds simple to organically grow or balance territories to serve the best client with the best reps, however, bigger the business, more complex it's resource and market allocations become. Quota assignment is both - art and science, in addition to resource and territory assignment one must figure out if a) top-down targets are realistic, b) aligns with bottom-up, and c) where it stands with holistically with Marketing, Operating, R&D, and other budgets.

An ideal sales process starts way before territory and sales rep assignments take place. It starts with an evaluation of existing account's potential, customer trend, market potential, and growth opportunities followed by preparation of annual financial plan factoring in the competitive landscape, sales history, production capacity, workforce; and this forecast is adjusted throughout the year based to steer the business in right direction. This is why Jill Konrath says: “Sales is an outcome, not a goal. It’s a function of doing numerous things right, starting from the moment you target a potential prospect until you finalize the deal.”

Especially in the post-COVID era, we learned that change is no more required - it is existential and it starts with an organization's planning processes. It requires faster and more frequent adjustments more than ever. Businesses may need to strategies and course-correct in a much shorter time to survive and thrive both. Businesses can no longer afford to have longer, one-directional planning processes where strategies were pushed down for execution. It needs to be bi-directional, transparent and integrated so sales can talk to finance and set a target for the company that is achievable.

 

The latest sales planning cloud module allows Sales to collaborate with finance to improve sales operations and efficiency, by setting quotas and aligning territories. This module helps in intelligently understanding the market capacity and identifying an organization-wide target for the upcoming year. Once finalized, it helps in collectively and collaboratively distribute quotas and allocate resources to maximize the probability of hitting targets and best serve the market. This model boasts industries' leading practices and provides an opportunity to easily configure and tailor them for individual needs.  

The above elegant dashboard serves as a landing page with tons of insights including - Last year's booking, Growth %, Goals, Territory Analysis, Seasonality Trends, etc.

 

We still have all of our existing EPM capabilities intact where we can:

1. Use advanced predictive planning to forecast base numbers  

2. Use a single click system-generated allocations to resources or territories 

3. Review, adjust or override the system generated quotas 

4. Feed the data back to the financial forecast

Being in-line with other EPM modules, Sales planning provides flexibility to configure Sales planning using the following options and supports integration with Sales operations:

If you want to take a data-driven approach to take sales planning to the next level, this is a tool that can be of great assistance. Do reach out if you need help with an EPM integrated Sales and Quota planning!

Cheers!

Rahul S.

#EPM #Planning #EPMSales