Business leaders are responsible for hitting revenue targets and margin growth while creating exceptional experiences for customers, prospects, and employees. In today’s environment, however, when marketplace reality shifts at an unprecedented pace and disruptions are the norm, designing this plan can pose a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Technology adoption and market trends are speeding up with no indication of slowing down.
2020 revealed you can’t plan for a year in advance.
If the year 2020 is the perfect example of anything, it’s that sales leaders cannot plan for a year in advance and assume the strategies they outlined at the end of the past year will continue to yield results through the next. Anything can happen, so companies must equip their teams with real-time data insights to adjust plans in real time so they can make confident decisions in any market conditions.
Business agility is crucial to surviving.
Today, companies must build the ability to quickly adapt to shifts in marketplace reality. According to Gartner, 69% of corporate leaders want to accelerate the deployment of digital strategies for their enterprise to deal with ongoing disruption. This transformation is paramount.
In order to adapt, they must become more agile than they are today to be able to pivot on a dime at a moment’s notice as opportunities and threats manifest in their niche. Sales, as a business function, has now clearly identified that agility has a direct impact on its ability to foster revenue and growth.
If sales success begins with a plan designed to achieve company goals, that identifies where the company is, where it wants to go and the route to get there, what to do?
When it comes to sales planning, being agile means that sales organizations have to regularly evaluate their assumptions as the year progresses and change course as needed to stay on track to hit sales and revenue targets.
The need for continuous sales planning
Continuous sales planning allows us to do just that. But what is it exactly?
Continuous sales planning is the process of using up-to-date, trusted data insights to analyze plan performance and make changes weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even at a moment’s notice. The main purpose of the practice is to give you the ability to pivot whenever you need to, in order to stay on track to hit targets.
Organizations must increase their planning frequency.
Some sales organizations still conduct sales planning as a manual, once-a-year exercise. In a study conducted by Forrester, business leaders stated that speed was the most important factor to effectively plan and execute on their goals. Annual — or even quarterly — planning will no longer cut it.
Organizations must now make near-real-time course corrections based on current and trusted data.
Sales leaders have to evolve to the point of being able to make on-the-fly course corrections based on current and trusted data if they intend on driving success in their organizations. They cannot make strategic course changes when they build budgets and forecasts from outdated data. The most advanced sales organizations already take advantage of these insights to adjust critical sales incentives and growth targets as the market changes.
Companies that want to hit their targets need to be able to adapt sales plans as fast as the market changes. Disruptions don’t wait for the “right time” to arrive, so why should we expect that we can wait until the end of a period to adjust our sales plans? Through proactive and continuous monitoring of performance data, companies are able to identify deviations and course-correct before being derailed from their target goals.
Unfortunately, Forrester reports that only 27% of business leaders surveyed believe their organization is very effective at course correcting in real-time.
Continuous sales planning ensures your team is constantly evaluating whether the go-to-market approach is still relevant to existing market conditions.
Organizations can’t afford to guess when it comes to real-time decision making.
Forrester reports that 90% of business leaders say making real-time decisions based on real-time insights is important to be effective. 84% say they need to make those plan changes based on trusted data, not gut-level instinct. However, only 48% of decisions are made on quantitative information and analysis, and this statistic has improved little in the past few years.
34% of go-to-market leaders still ground their decisions on gut feelings, past experience, or their own opinions. This can point you in the wrong direction if you’re not informed correctly.
Continuous sales planning ensures your data is up-to-date, which eliminates the gut instinct vs. data battle. Thus, any decisions are well-informed and can be made quickly.
Companies must also align their go-to-market teams.
The sales department is the foundation of the company’s success, so corporate leaders need to ensure sales teams and processes are running as smoothly and efficiently as possible. However, winning sales and growing revenue is a shared responsibility between different functions across the whole company. As such, planning cannot be conducted in silos. It’s essential that go-to-market functions collaborate and align their efforts.
For example, sales expense budgets touch multiple business functions beyond sales, such as marketing, operations, and human resources, and planning must be aligned with the company’s financial targets. This means that all these organizations must be aligned on the use of designated resources in order to hit their target.
If recently onboarded salespeople have to meet quota, sales has to collaborate and secure the agreement of human resources and executive leadership. To increase the yield of lead generation activities, sales has to collaborate with marketing so marketing can adjust its budget accordingly.
When there’s a shortage of collaboration and alignment among the various business functions, organizations begin to operate in silos. The end result is a disjointed business environment in which decisions are not integrally aligned and based on gut-feeling instead of data.
To stay competitive in the face of increasingly accelerated disruption, many companies need to optimize their plans and operations to ensure that all teams are effectively integrated and on the same page.
The case for continuous planning is indisputable. However…
Fewer than 33% of companies are able to implement continuous sales planning.
Less than one-third of companies have the data accessibility and planning processes in place to successfully course-correct should marketplace reality shift. This is a big problem, considering we’re smack in the middle of a time where frequent sales and incentive plan changes are 100% necessary.
This means that close to 70% of organizations are unequipped to respond to market changes. They know continuous planning is necessary but can’t execute it effectively.
Why? What prevents them from successfully implementing a practice required for their survival.
We believe it comes down to 3 reasons.
1. Companies lack a formalized approach to planning.
CSO Insights states that 67% of organizations lack a formalized approach to forecasting. Sales planning involves more than forecasting, of course. This data point suggests that, if forecasting is the weakest link, 67% of organizations lack a formalized approach to planning.
The benefits of formalizing the planning approach are clear, though. Ventana Research (now part of of ISG Research) reports that, when it comes to producing accurate budgets:
- 60% of companies that have a formalized and effective budgeting process achieve them;
- Only 24% of companies with an adequate process achieve them;
- Only 5% of companies with a poor process achieve them.
In our current market environment, companies now have to frequently monitor your sales plans and evolving market conditions to respond swiftly to them. This is impossible without a formalized, streamlined approach to planning. By streamlining planning processes, sales organizations can quickly pivot and take new approaches to quotas, territories, roles, and targets depending on shifting market dynamics.
2. Sales people are short on time.
Upland Software (changed their name to Altify) reported that salespeople typically spend 2.5 hours per week on forecasting, and Korn Ferry reports that sales managers spend 34% of their time forecasting, although predictions are typically less than 75% accurate.
Salesforce’s State of Sales white paper from May 2018 reported that sales teams were so overwhelmed with duties that they only spent one-third of their working time actually selling. Among their non-selling duties, 9% of their time was spent on planning.
Of that time, a lot of time is wasted copying and pasting information from the CRM into different planning platforms, which is an extremely low value activity. Salespeople are taken away from precious selling time to carry out these tasks, and sales managers spend more time compiling forecasts and sales plans than actually analyzing them and coming up with effective approaches to mitigate gaps.
If salespeople are already short on time to sell, how can they possibly free up time to be involved in continuous planning?
This leads us into the third constraint.
3. Sales organizations don’t have adequate planning tools.
Spreadsheets cripple organizations’ planning efforts.
Spreadsheets have been around for more than 30 years because they are an indispensable tool that enhances productivity, analysis and insight. They can be effective when used by individuals or by small groups in one-off situations. However, they present serious limitations when used in enterprise settings that demand collaboration, especially when applied to planning.
Corporate employees naturally turn to spreadsheets because they are handily available, are easy to use and require no additional cost. However, the time saved in setup gets wasted in seeking out errors, correcting assumptions, dealing with limited dimensionality, controlling versions and putting together reports.
Accuracy errors are common when using spreadsheets.
Ventana Research reports that, in 13 published field audits, 88% of spreadsheets contained errors, 5 to 30% of them either serious or very serious and some having material financial consequences. This happens because it’s surprisingly easy for errors to occur and go undetected, especially if many different people are working on the same spreadsheet.
Ventana’s research uncovered that 39% of organizations frequently find errors in spreadsheets; only 8% rarely or never find errors. Data in cells also can be inaccurate, especially if it is entered or updated by hand. Moreover, links to other spreadsheets or data feeds can break.
Most spreadsheet work consists of consolidating multiple spreadsheets for analysis and reporting. But even very experienced users find it challenging to consolidate spreadsheets. As a result, consolidation is yet another source of spreadsheet errors.
Spreadsheets don't enable timely responses.
For companies to be able to respond quickly to shifting marketplace reality, they must be able to analyze their data in real time. Half of the companies benchmarked by Ventana Research can’t provide numbers within the first business week after the month end. Their research also found that in more than 50% of companies, stale or outdated data contaminates their metrics and KPIs. This translates into weeks or over a month before a company can address an issue that affected its performance. At that point, the opportunity has been lost.
Ventana confirms that the use of spreadsheets in business processes increases the time it takes to complete them merely due to solving spreadsheet issues. More than 50% of companies report that multiple versions of spreadsheets circulate through the company, creating multiple sources of truth and contributing even more to delays.
Spreadsheets don’t offer an adequate level of interactivity with the data.
In order to manage and adjust performance, it’s no longer sufficient to work with static displays of data. When a KPI doesn’t match expectations, leaders need to understand why. Often, they can only find the answer buried under several layers of data.
Ventana Research reports that business leaders need two key capabilities when it comes to financial analytics:
- Find specific answers to standard business questions
- Drill down to granular levels to identify the drivers of disparities or trends
Spreadsheets fail at providing these two capabilities.
Spreadsheets pose risks to GRC management.
More and more, companies value governance, risk and compliance management. Most enterprise-level systems now include process management and workflow controls to ensure compliance with company policies. Spreadsheets do not offer such controls, and even invalidate them.
As such, the use of spreadsheets poses a serious risk to GRC management to justify their continued use for critical business analysis. Companies need tools that offer secure and dependable analytical processes.
In summary, using spreadsheets to plan is tolerable if:
Your company plans only once a year.
You have small teams.
Your company has low levels of complexity (few territories, single currency, few offerings, etc).
Otherwise, relying on spreadsheets will cripple your growth efforts. This means sales organizations committed to continuous planning must turn to planning platforms.
Planning platforms offer configuration, data shuttling and context switching constraints that translate into time and financial costs.
The sales organization’s parameters must be configured into the planning platform.
Before anyone can take advantage of the planning platform, several parameters have to be configured into it so it can effectively mirror the structure of sales processes. For example, planning platforms don’t come pre-configured with security and permission models, territory models or multi-currency.
All of these will have to be programmed — and maintained — into the platform to mirror the CRM’s parameters.
Data has to be shuttled into the planning platform.
There’s no pipeline information or pipeline stages in the planning platform. There’s also no prospect, customer or opportunity record. Finally, there are no sales team members in the platform.
Every bit of data you want to include in planning has to be shuttled into the platform. Each “shuttling” addition has a cost to deploy and maintain and introduces the possibility of errors.
Your sales team doesn’t operate on the planning platform.
If you want salespeople to contribute to the planning platform, they have to log into it. The problem is, that’s not where they spend most of their time. They have to switch context, which has been shown in Gartner research to be a significant drain on their productivity.
On account of the shortcomings of Excel spreadsheets and planning platforms for the purposes of go-to-market planning, the most effective course of action is to build planning functionality into the CRM.
Continuous sales planning becomes possible by bringing it inside the CRM.
When organizations have all their sales data in one central place, updated in real time, marketplace reality and organizational changes immediately stand out in the data. These changes instantly translate into risks to meeting target numbers.
For example, let’s say a leader initiates a sales effort in Q1 with a 50-member sales team. In April, two of them quit. The CRM will immediately notify that leader that the target is in jeopardy. Another example that will resonate with most was when lockdown policies went into effect during the pandemic. Forecasts instantly shifted, and a CRM equipped with sophisticated forecasting capabilities could have offered deep visibility into the change and helped leaders adjust accordingly.
By having a single source of truth, the organization can rapidly understand the impact of the disruption and adjust its plan accordingly before the gap becomes too wide.
1. All key go-to-market parameters are already configured in the CRM.
As the repository for customer information and sales efforts, the CRM naturally has all the important parameters built-in for daily use and reporting. Moreover, these parameters don’t need to be mirrored in different systems. As the sales organization evolves and it changes parameters to suit its evolution, these changes are automatically reflected in the planning functionality without significant efforts and margins of error.
These parameters include, but aren’t limited to:
All members of the sales team
As the most frequent users of the CRM, all members of the sales team are already set up in the CRM along with their account assignments and the appropriate permission and security model.
Multi-currency model
If the sales organization operates across multiple currency zones, the planning system must account for the multi-currency model and its multiple exchange rates. It’s much more efficient to leverage the model already configured and updated in the CRM than to keep updating it in the planning platform.
Territory model
If the sales organization uses an account coverage model, it’s already configured in the CRM.
Most sales organizations update the territory model eventually to account for go-to-market strategy changes or shifts in the size of the sales organization. By having planning functionality embedded within the CRM, these updates are automatically taken into account in planning.
Reporting, dashboards and notifications
To effectively manage the sales organizations, sales leaders need solid reporting, dashboard and notifications capabilities. Out-of-the-box, CRMs like Salesforce come with these capabilities, which can be further enhanced by adding data visualization and analytics tools such as Tableau.
2. The sales team can be trained rapidly.
Members of the sales team already know how to operate the CRM platform.
Since the sales team uses the CRM on a daily basis, there's no need for extensive training to adopt the new planning functionalities — which would happen if they had to learn to operate a brand new platform. Their familiarity with the CRM environment makes the transition simpler, minimizes disruption and maximizes efficiency.
By bringing planning into their existing environment, the company allows the sales team to focus on strategy and execution instead of being bogged down by technical challenges.
3. Sales opportunities data is already on the CRM platform.
The CRM platform already contains vital sales opportunities data.
This integration is crucial because sales opportunities are constantly changing, and their data is essential for accurate forecasting. Attempting to transfer this dynamic data to a separate planning platform would be challenging, and likely to cause errors. By planning directly within the CRM, organizations eliminate the time-consuming hassle of filtering through opportunities to determine which ones to shuttle.
This ensures that forecasting and planning are based on the most current, timely and accurate data available.
4. Actuals can flow into the CRM platform.
The CRM platform can seamlessly integrate actual sales data.
Salesforce, for instance, allows for incoming data integrations from any ERP system or data source, just like any planning platform. This means sales organizations can import data from their accounting systems into Salesforce to perform variance analysis between budgeted revenue and actuals. By consolidating this data within the CRM, organizations can streamline their analysis and improve the speed and accuracy of their financial forecasting.
This integration capability ensures that the CRM remains a central, comprehensive repository for relevant sales and financial data.
5. Salesforce has powerful AI capabilities built-in that can inform budgeting and forecasting.
With artificial intelligence becoming more and more present in business software, Salesforce is one of the first CRM platforms to have integrated it within its core features.
Few planning platforms can rival the capabilities of the AI engine Salesforce has developed. It mostly uses machine learning and natural language processing for predictive analysis. The benefit you gain from planning on the CRM is that you benefit from a large native data set, which can grow even bigger if you bring in data from additional sources.
Predictive scoring assigns each prospect a score to show its chances of conversion into an opportunity. It uses different factors like source, industry, region to predict the scoring. Once an opportunity is created, AI can also predict its probability of conversion and the length of the sales cycle.
When translated into planning, these capabilities exponentially expand the go-to-market’s team ability to budget and forecast, as it can now get a much more precise idea of when revenue will come in and when sales, marketing and operations resources must be deployed.
6. Executives benefit from near real-time data to make strategic decisions.
Making decisions based on lagging data versus real-time data can significantly impact strategic outcomes.
Real-time data provides leaders with the most current information and allows them to make informed, timely decisions. In contrast, relying on outdated data — shuttled into a different platform — can lead to missed opportunities, inaccurate forecasts, and reactive rather than proactive strategies. Having immediate access to up-to-date sales data helps executives to stay ahead of market trends and swiftly adapt to changes.
This ability to leverage real-time data ensures that executives make decisions based on what is, not what was.
7. Go-to-market teams can immediately act upon the forecast.
Team members can effortlessly transition from analyzing and forecasting to scheduling activities that support sales efforts.
This seamless workflow is only possible if planning functionalities are integrated within the CRM platform, which already contains go-to-market tools. By having everything in one place, go-to-market teams can quickly interpret forecasts and immediately set up corresponding actions, such as campaigns and follow-ups. Strategic insights can be rapidly translated into concrete actions.
This elegant solution enhances the team's ability to respond to market conditions.
If this makes sense...
We'd love to show you how PLNR solves all the challenges of continuous planning and can help you reap all its benefits almost instantly.
