CRM sales planning, as usual... See if this sounds familiar…
The forecast review meeting stretches into its third hour. Someone pulls up the Salesforce dashboard. Bars and dials update in real time. Pipeline coverage sits at 3.2x. Win rates trend up 12% quarter-over-quarter. The funnel converts at 23%.
Then someone asks, "So what should our Q3 targets actually be?"
Silence. Your CRM has nothing to say about what should happen.
This is where CRM sales planning breaks down.
Your system only knows what did happen.
Your CRM is a rearview mirror
Every object, every field, every relationship in your CRM was built to capture execution.
- Opportunity created
- Stage changed
- Deal closed
- Lost reason logged
It's a meticulous record of history, that audit trail that tells you exactly what your team did, when they did it, and how it turned out.
That's incredibly valuable. Fundamentally, though, it's backward-looking.
Reports and dashboards ask sophisticated versions of one question:
"What happened?"
They slice history into segments by rep, by region, by product. Your forecast feels like it's about the future, but it's really just a projection based on what's already in motion.
You're predicting, not planning.
Planning requires something CRM doesn't have
When you plan, you model the future. You ask: What should we aim for? How should we deploy resources? What assumptions are we making, and how do we test them?
CRM sales planning breaks down here because these questions require structure that CRM doesn't provide:
Forward-looking scenarios
Your CRM tracks what is. Planning models what could be under different assumptions.
Capacity modeling
CRM knows how many reps you have. Planning calculates how many deals each rep can realistically work, then maps quota to territory potential.
Iterative versioning
Plans evolve. You draft, test assumptions, adjust, and republish. CRM doesn't version your thinking. It updates the current state and discards what came before.
The "should" layer
CRM tells you a rep closed $400K last quarter. Planning tells you they're targeting $500K next quarter based on territory coverage, deal size trends, and capacity. That gap between actual and target? That's where planning lives. CRM doesn't hold it.
The CRM sales planning gap: forecasts vs. plans
A forecast predicts based on current pipeline and historical close rates. It answers: Based on what we see today, what's likely to happen?
A plan commits based on capacity, market opportunity, and strategic priorities. It answers: Based on what we're capable of and what the business needs, what should happen?
Your forecast might say, "We're tracking to $2.1M this quarter." Your plan says, "We committed to $2.5M, and here's the deployment strategy to close the gap."
Traditional CRM sales planning answers the first question. Strategic planning answers the second.
Even companies with mature CRM deployments still plan in spreadsheets. Excel gives you the blank canvas to model forward. You can build scenarios, version assumptions, and create the "should" layer that CRM lacks.
Problem is, once you build the plan in Excel, it's disconnected from execution. Your CRM tracks reality. Your spreadsheet holds the targets. Every month, someone needs to manually reconcile the two to see if you're on track.
The real cost of this gap
Without effective CRM sales planning integration:
- Your sales team doesn't trust the targets because they can't see the assumptions behind them.
- Finance doesn't trust the forecast because it's not tied to a defensible model.
- Leadership makes decisions with two sources of truth that never quite align.
Stop and consider this: your CRM investment (likely tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, countless hours of configuration, rigorous adoption enforcement) hasn't solved the problem you actually need it to solve. It tells you what happened with incredible precision.
That's great.
But the planning of what happens next still lives in spreadsheets.
Close the gap
Solving this means recognizing that tracking and planning are different disciplines that require different structures.
True CRM sales planning needs to live on top of your CRM.
Close enough to pull execution data, but separate enough to model the future without corrupting your historical record. It needs to version assumptions, model capacity, and create the "should" layer that your team can actually execute against.
When you stop expecting your CRM to do something it wasn't designed for, you can start building the structure that actually closes the gap between "what happened" and "what should happen next."
At that point, planning (and your CRM) can actually start driving execution.
