Categories: Sales Planning
A salesperson’s time is valuable. Ensure your sales team is spending their time building a pipeline of high-value accounts. Support your sales managers and reps in developing a result-driven plan that focuses them on pursuing these high-value opportunities.
Put a process in place that helps your salespeople repeatedly and consistently drive effective sales plans. Provide your managers the tools and resources to support their salespeople in finding revenue gaps in their territory, uncovering value in existing accounts and creating targeted lists based on what’s uncovered.
Align your team around a consistent sales planning mindset. Here's how:
Set a Results-Driven Focus Early on in the Planning Process
How salespeople build pipelines and sales plans for each quarter greatly impacts forecast accuracy and consistency. You can avoid having every quarter become a scramble to hit the number by implementing a results-driven sales planning mindset across your organization. This mindset should focus your sales team on building their plan to make their plan early on.
Consider, how well are your teams covering each territory and key accounts in those territories? Ensure your salespeople consider all sources of revenue as they plan.
Rather than solely focusing reps on the opportunity level, we often help our customers see the benefit of using a sales franchise mindset. The sales franchise mindset is what we refer to when sales teams build their pipeline starting at the territory level in a way that cascades down to the opportunity level. Using this mindset, your salespeople can begin to see their territories as their own business unit. The result is an improved ability to drive consistent pipeline and focus reps on high-value opportunities.
Help Your Managers Create the Cadence that Drives Consistency
Do your front-line managers have a cadence that helps them consistently coach reps to success?
The amount of time your front-line managers waste just trying to keep up with the forecast is valuable time not spent on helping their team sell. Ensure consistency and improve efficiency by giving your front-line managers tools that make their jobs easier. Develop a sales operating rhythm that provides a consistent language and process around: Territory, Account, Opportunity and Forecast reviews.
Implement a predictable cadence around these planning activities that enables your managers to improve forecast accuracy and help their reps build healthy pipelines. Implementing a management operating cadence helps to drive alignment between manager and seller activities. The right cadence provides adequate time, resources and tools that your managers can use to coach reps on how to build the plan to hit quarterly and annual goals.
We call the tool that drives a predictable planning cadence a Management Operating Rhythm® (MOR). It helps sales leaders focus on executable action with their sales teams. A MOR brings together all of your sales planning and execution processes in one tool. With a MOR in place, you provide your managers the time and resources to support sales reps in setting a result-driven sales plan. Using this cadence, managers are able to regularly coach reps on identifying gaps in their deals and refining their revenue predictions before they commit them to the next forecast.
Drive Consistent Revenue Growth
Achieving healthy growth and predictable revenue are top-of-mind for all C-suite leaders. How do the most successful leaders enable their sales organizations to plan ahead and hit revenue targets, quarter after quarter? Often sales planning and sales execution activities go hand in hand when working to improve forecast accuracy and business predictability.
See what successful sales leaders do to make an impact and support their sales organization in driving consistent and predictable revenue growth. You may find value in what ClickSoftware implemented to drive nearly 100% forecast accuracy, quarter after quarter.
