Do you manage by a well-defined sales plan or gut instinct?

在我们的生活中做出决策时，我们与我们的直觉或直觉并不罕见。最近，我和我的妻子丽莎（Lisa）旅行带我们的儿子参加我们从未去过的小镇的​​体育赛事。凭着直觉的本能，我在车上左转，然后是右转，另一个左转，在我不知不觉中，我们已经失去了返回。我接受了丽莎的建议，终于拉开了路线 - 您会认为我现在会学习这一课。她从未说过：“我告诉你我们应该计划我们的指示”，但我可以读她的想法。制定计划很重要，如果您是负责实现您指定的销售配额并推动更好销售业绩的销售领导者，而不仅仅是将儿子驱使您的儿子参加体育赛事，则更为重要。

定义明确的销售计划有助于指导销售团队到达目的地。高表现的销售负责人认识到，如果他们“不计划计划，他们计划失败”，因此他们每年都会经历计划过程，以试图将其销售策略与公司目标保持一致。但这足够了吗？制定销售计划是必不可少的，但是销售负责人频繁地忽略了销售计划，而是恢复了依靠直觉来推动日常活动。

I remember working with one group of sales leaders from a medical device company who all agreed that having a sales plan defined was critical for them to deliver better sales performance. I spent several days with them working through their corporate objectives and understanding their customer segmentations, customer buying habits, geographic locations, and the company’s product offerings. We discussed and designed their sales领土覆盖范围model, key accounts, and what sales people and roles were needed to support their go-to-market approach. We crunched numbers well into the late evening hours, looking at historical sales rep performance and market opportunity in each of the territories, and finally reached consensus that the sales reps all had attainable quotas. As the final step, we met with the compensation team to map key performance metrics and components of the激励赔偿计划确保销售代表获得与销售策略和公司目标保持一致的所需行为的信用。我们完成了。如果需要适应某种破坏或更改，我们可以进行销售计划，可以跟踪，监控和调整。

令人惊讶的是，这一切几乎立即开始出错。在投入了大量时间和数小时，建立了该销售计划（我们都同意并认为这将带来成功的一项销售计划），一些销售领导者回到基于他们的直觉做出决定。亚搏彩票手机版免费下载就像我开车带我的儿子参加那个体育赛事一样，他们忽略了计划。我注意到了他们的一些评论。

• “I’m going to bump up Sally’s quota by a few points. She’s our best sales rep – she’ll crush her numbers like she did last year.”
• “约翰需要维护帐户xyz。我知道这不是我们讨论和分配的领土的一部分，但他在该帐户中有一些关系。”
• “We need to give some relief to Sandra. I know that the accelerators defined in her incentive plan don’t kick in until she has attained X% of her quota but remember how she reacted last year when she was just shy of reaching her quota. I don’t want that to happen again.”

Far too often, sales leaders agree that having a well-defined sales plan is essential but in the end turn to gut instinct and start to make exceptions. Once a sales leader makes exceptions for one sales rep, they begin to do the same for others. And once one sales leader starts to make exceptions, others quickly follow and gut instinct wins over the sales plan.

Remember, the sales plan is intended to help direct the sales team to reach their destination, which is really to achieve the overall corporate objectives. A well-defined sales plan can make or break your sales productivity and making exceptions to the sales plan can lead to shortcomings of the sales plan.

In order to better understand what global sales organizations’ planning processes looks like and to diagnose common inefficiencies,SiriusDecisions进行了一个主要研究项目，以收集大量全球公司的数据. Here are a few findings from the survey and points from experience that sales leaders should pay attention to if they want a well-defined sales plan and avoid relying on gut instinct.

• For most large organizations, sales planning is a siloed process. It is important to have the right people engaged in thesales planning processincluding sales, marketing, human resources, finance, and others.
• High performing sales leaders start the sales planning process two to three months before the end of the current fiscal year and finish before the start of a new fiscal year. The sales planning process can take time – get started early.
• 大多数组织都using two to three years of data to support the planning process. A well-defined sales plan is partially based on historical sales performance. Having the sales plan that is derived from the numbers helps sales leaders avoid reverting back to gut instinct.
• Half of the organizations that participated in the survey go through more than five iterations of their sales plan before completion. Revisit your initial assumptions, challenge them before you lock down the sales plan.
• Adoption of better sales planning tools cuts down the number of planning iterations, which increases productivity. When everyone collaborates and agrees on the sales plan, it becomes more difficult for one sales leader to waive from the plan and begin making exceptions.

销售量planning is an essential exercise for sales leaders and it is challenging to get it right. However; without a well-defined sales plan established through collaboration, reviewing historical performance, market opportunity, and ensuring consensus – you are ‘failing to plan, and planning to fail’ and when you discover you’re failing, it is not easy to pull over and ask for directions…it’s too late, you’re lost beyond return.

Join Mark B. Levinson, service director, sales operations strategies at SiriusDecisions, and Kevin Gray, director, product marketing at Anaplan, for an upcomingwebinarthat will reveal key findings from the survey conducted by SiriusDecisions and learn “How your enterprise sales plan can make or break your sales productivity” while discovering:

• How long is the average sales planning process?
• 该过程对配额设置有什么影响？
• 销售代表对销售计划中的延误有何反应？
• Anaplan如何帮助企业组织解决SiriusDecisions调查中发现的挑战

立即注册以保存您的位置对于2014年11月12日的网络研讨会，并步入正轨，以进行更有生产力的销售计划过程。