Concept: Sales Planning
Sales planning is one use case supported by Adaptive Planning to enable you to plan for sales.
Sales planning consists of 2 capabilities that work together:
- Capacity and quota planning.
- Territory planning.
Sales planning relies heavily on dashboards for planning and analyzing. Through the course of your sales planning cycle, you can adjust your sheets from the dashboards. The charts dynamically update to display how the changes affect your sales plan.
Capacity and Quota Planning
Capacity and quota planning helps you ensure that you have enough sales resources available to meet planned sales goals. Charts specific to sales planning help you test adjustments to achieve your staffing goals.
Capacity and quota planning typically includes planning for things like:
- Seasonality: The performance cycle of your sales team through a year.
- Ramp up: The process of bringing a new sales person up to full performance.
- Quota attainment: The degree of achieving planned sales goals.
- Productivity: The measurement of missing or surpassing sales quotas.
With capacity and quota planning, dashboards let you view your plan. From the dashboard, you can make adjustments to test scenarios for hiring and staffing.
Territory Planning
Territory planning helps you create fair and balanced sales opportunities for your sales team. Use it to ensure that each territory is suitable for sales representatives. Is it big enough to meet the quotas of the sales representative? Is it small enough for the representative to cover it? You can also discover uncovered territory, which helps you avoid uncollected revenue.
Territory planning typically includes planning for things like:
- Altering sales head count.
- Adjusting sales quotas.
- Redistributing your sales representatives across geographies or industry types.
- Changing what geographical hierarchies make a territory.
- Accelerating new hire ramp-up so that new sales representatives gain responsibilities, faster.
Sales Planning Versions
Versions in sales planning act more like scenarios. You can select different versions from the version prompt, which is visible from dashboards and sheets.
Sales Planning Dashboards
The dashboards and perspectives you use are specific to the sales workflow and operations of your company.
We recommend that you have at least 2 perspectives: 1 for Capacity and Quota Planning, and 1 for Territory Planning. You can build each perspective with dashboards that have various charts. Organize the dashboards with tabs to help you complete 1 portion of your planning process at a time. You can visit each tab, analyze your existing data, and make adjustments to individual sheets and charts. Then analyze how those changes tweak the results across your dashboards.