Across the region, business leaders are contemplating what change management means for them in a post-pandemic world. For many, change is continual. It is not a single, stand-alone process. Business agility, adaptation to market conditions, all the while sales teams seek to deliver against aspirational targets.
Annual strategic sales planning via manual spreadsheet processes is no longer ideal to support that continual change. Dynamic sales planning and leveraging the power of AI allows businesses to constantly query and assess their direction. Real-time decision-making on pipeline growth and human-capacity optimisation can support organisations as they face the challenges of the pandemic era. Sales teams looking to acquire top talent will need to be able to adapt and simplify their planning to retain that talent long-term.
Strategic sales planning, at a glance
Historically, strategic sales planning was the de facto standard. Five-year plans sketched out in detail to illustrate the goals of the sales function, how they aligned with the corporate vision, and how activities (including talent recruitment) and resources would combine to deliver what was required. Strategic sales planning starts with corporate planning, where a unified action plan is devised by individual business units. Planners compose a roadmap, keeping in mind fundamentals such as core business principles, USPs, goals and strategy. Next, the application of analyses such as SWOT, audits, and reviews of customer and competitor trends.
Through these studies, the gap between targets and actuals will be revealed. Strategy maps then come into play to establish sales targets and this operational planning gives way to implementation, including the empowerment of employees and the orchestration of measures. Finally, performance is monitored at regular intervals to ensure appropriate decisions can be taken.
But this approach is often insufficient to cover all of the business complexities, human collaboration, and issues with data and tools necessary to serve the business in the modern age. The relationship between management and customer expectations; the rise of globalised markets; the role of employees in collecting data and evaluating it; and the quality of the tools needed for such processes – all these and more frequently end up being overlooked in legacy strategic sales planning.
Sales performance management
A new approach – one that is tailored to the dynamic times in which we live – will be invaluable to allow the region’s businesses to take advantage of the significant opportunities that are now possible. Sales Performance Management (SPM) blends the holistic process of strategic sales planning with the best in digital technology to empower you to react in real-time to changes, plan for opportunities, and uncover what you didn’t know was possible.
A fundamental challenge faced by sales planners is complexity across processes. The spreadsheet analyses of the past are part of a fragmented sea of manual tasks that lead to a labour-intensive implementation of strategic sales planning. Today, teams discover that spreadsheets and the isolated solutions that supplement them simply do not have the capacity to adapt to fast-changing markets. If organisations are to overcome these challenges and streamline the workflows behind strategic sales planning, SPM provides a clear path forward.
Strategic sales planning is the foundation of operational and sales planning. It provides a framework for evaluating and controlling concrete measures. With the capabilities of an integrated SPM solution, businesses attain the very transparency that breaks down the complexities and frustrations associated with business processes, human collaboration, data, and tools.
Enhanced insights
Integrated SPM unifies planning to increase efficiency and effectiveness across the enterprise. It accelerates and simplifies processes while uncovering hidden potential. Enhanced insights enable more accurate sales planning and more. Data is more visual, up-to-date, and secure, so sales teams can take optimal control of the customer and product mix, as well as optimising capacity-planning and sales cycles more than they previously thought possible. Meanwhile, incentivising talent becomes easier with improved transparency.
Sales performance management facilitates enhanced decision-making and trust across the organisation through this data transparency. With this, better agility is achieved through real-time planning supported by AI-based predictive analysis. And it relieves employees of arduous manual spreadsheet operations through automation.
And the sales team is not the only one to reap the benefits of SPM. Finance sees greater ease in compliance and audit operations and has the opportunity to simplify plans and processes. Operations can improve forecasting, eliminate shadow accounting, and provide accurate, on-time payment while reducing risk. The IT department can better optimise its resources, reduce deployment, training, and consulting burdens, enhance data integrity, security, and system performance, and improve integration between systems.
Keeping pace with change
In a rapidly shifting market, SPM allows planners a clearer picture of what is possible for the future, shorten their budgeting cycles and increase the accuracy of forecasts. Sales planning gets a much-needed overhaul through a unified solution that adapts the planning process to fit the velocity of change. Sales performance management is the next generation of long-term, top-down strategic sales planning.
Enterprises that adopt SPM will lead the way in their industries with sales planning. The region is in recovery mode and that means rapid change at the best of times. But this recovery is characterised by industries adapting to accommodate new consumer habits by bridging real-time knowledge gaps and increasing transparency.
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