Transform your sales planning in 2024 for profitable growth

Go-to-market planning is the beating heart of your organization's success, the driver of revenue growth. However, the challenges of integrating your sales, customer success, partner, marketing, and financial planning have never been more formidable, nor have the stakes been higher. Economic uncertainty, limited resources, and an evolving customer journey put pressure on companies to deliver profitable growth across product lines, channels, and geographies. But inadequate systems, disconnected data, and siloed processes hold many businesses back.

Manual, disjointed planning practices lead to frustrated sales teams, lower sales productivity, and missed targets. To thrive in today’s climate, you need an efficient, data-driven sales planning process. This process gets your plans out by sales kick-off, focuses your teams on accounts which have the greatest revenue potential, and motivates them with achievable targets and incentives so you can outmaneuver and beat the competition.

In this blog, we delve into the common pitfalls and challenges businesses face when it comes to sales and go-to-market planning, and provide a roadmap to success, guided by insights from our eBook, The essential guide to go-to-market planning.

The cost of poor sales planning

Ineffective planning hurts your bottom line. Without accurate data and a repeatable, scalable planning framework, sales and operations teams struggle to optimize territory design, quota setting, sales capacity, incentive compensation management, and more. This leads to:

• Missed quotas: According to the Sales Management Association, only 41% of salespeople in organizations with ineffective sales planning hit their targets.
• Lost selling time: Getting your plans out late and last-minute territory & quota adjustments result in frustrated reps and less time in front of your customers.
• Low sales productivity: With no clear view of high-value prospects and customers, you miss growth opportunities and risk coverage gaps.
• Higher costs: Regrettable attrition when your top performers leave, higher customer acquisition costs to catch up, and a lack of capacity to manage your planning processes.

Clearly, the status quo is not sustainable. To hit your numbers, you need to transform your 2024 sales planning processes — increasing sales productivity, optimizing the deployment of your limited resources, and achieving profitable growth depend on it.

A practical guide to planning success

Our eBook provides a practical playbook to streamline your planning. With detailed steps and best practices, it’s your roadmap to:

• Organizing data in a single hub to feed planning models and consolidate information from CRM, HRM, finance, and across go-to-market teams.
• Creating frameworks to align planning contributors and sequence activities for efficiency.
• Modeling scenarios to assess performance drivers and growth levers with “what-if” analysis.
• Distributing plans seamlessly with contextual insights into quota and territory rationale.
• Monitoring in real-time to rapidly adjust strategies as market conditions shift.

The recent Forrester Wave™ report on Sales Performance Management (SPM) platforms highlights the top vendors providing a robust set of SPM tools, including excellent data integration, quota modeling, territory design, and side-by-side plan comparison capabilities.

These tools are particularly tailored to large organizations seeking an integrated sales planning and performance management solution. For example, LinkedIn uses integrated go-to-market planning, starting their sales planning process by analyzing headcount needs by market. LinkedIn does their sales planning twice a year now while saving 7,500+ hours in GTM ops and cutting territory planning time by 75%.

With the right process, you too can boost sales productivity of your operations team and the field to seize growth opportunities.

Overcome pitfalls for planning excellence

Transforming sales planning is an undertaking. But with the right vision and tactics, you can overcome common pitfalls, including:

• Data challenges: Gathering accurate, timely data across systems is difficult. As a result, businesses spend more time debating their data instead of their go-to-market strategy. Overcome this by implementing a single data hub to feed all your sales planning. This provides trusted insights for decision-making.
• Siloed processes: Disjointed modeling and distribution lead to misalignment. Sales teams feel the brunt of last-minute changes and are unable to fly in formation with customer success and marketing to hit their numbers. Promote collaboration and the sharing of planning inputs and outputs through joint planning sessions. This builds alignment on goals and strategies.
• Inflexible plans: Inaccurate sales and revenue forecasting and sales planning models can’t keep pace with market shifts. Businesses react versus plan strategically. Adopt agile modeling and real-time monitoring. This enables dynamic adaptation as market conditions change.
• Lack of scalability: Growing channels, product lines and geographies strain manual processes. Planning complexity explodes and planning frameworks are rebuilt every year. Implement configurable platforms that scale as your business evolves. This maintains efficiency despite growing complexity.

Feels copy heavy - can we make this a table and have design turn into an image?

With the strategies in our eBook, you can overcome these roadblocks and set your sales team up for repeatable success. The time for change is now.

Feels copy heavy - can we make this a table and have design turn into an image?

Take the first step

Efficient, profitable growth depends on connecting your planning across the business. But where do you start on the path to go-to-market and sales planning excellence?

Downloading The essential guide to go-to-market planning is the first step. In this practical resource, you'll learn:

• A step-by-step framework to transform planning.
• How leading companies have achieved planning success.
• Key strategies to boost sales productivity and retention.

Download your free copy today. With these insights, you can build alignment, agility, and scalability into your sales planning process.