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Exclusive Q&A
Should sales organizations be more worried about closing deals rather than sales planning?
There is no argument that you must successfully execute to achieve sales and revenue targets. But success is measured by achieving objectives and goals. With omnichannel selling and more complex revenue and pricing models, sales and revenue planning leaves this less to chance. Having a well-constructed plan ensures incentives are in place to drive successful behavior, that territories are optimized to enable teams to succeed, and that quotas are achievable and mutually agreed upon with the revenue team. Plans enable all parties to understand where true north is and ensure the organization is primed for success.
What sales performance management processes are most used by best-in-class sales organizations?
As the buyer market is rapidly changing with customers demanding omni-channel, multi-touch engagement (including self-service) and more vendors adopting additional pricing models such as subscriptions, meeting the customer on their terms is more important than ever. Ensuring the right mix between named accounts, virtual and physical territories, and new self-service channels ensures that organizations are deploying resources to match customer expectations. Likewise, incentives need to recognize these changing buyer behaviors and allow sales organizations to be recognized for their contributions regardless of how the order is placed. Best-in-class organizations are aligning all three components of sales and revenue planning—territories, quotas and incentives—with overall objectives in mind that reflect changing buyer needs.
What role can AI and advanced analytics play in sales performance management, and what is necessary to make the use of AI a practical success?
Balancing omni-channel selling with physical and virtual territories and with named accounts is hard to achieve without assistance. Likewise, aligning quotas to targets is hard to optimize with many potential channels and sources of revenue, like renewals and expansion beyond traditional new business. AI can assist in optimizing across all these dimensions, but it is dependent on using timely and accurate data. This is why it is important to ensure that data is not buried in siloed applications but is instead utilized from source systems such as those in Finance and HR, in addition to historical sales actuals.
What metrics should organizations track to ensure plans are having the desired impact?
Although measuring the success of the sales and revenue organization can be as straightforward as “Did we make or exceed our target?” any new revenue planning application and technology needs both a strong business case and a way to ensure progress is being made along the way. The best approach to developing a business case is to identify where a new approach and technology will contribute to improved outcomes. Measurable improvements such as increased average deal size, shortened sales cycles, more timely and accurate revenue projections, or improved sales team retention rates are key sources of value for the project.
On the implementation side, it is important to recognize that successful projects are partnerships where technology providers and implementation partners guide not just how to automate current processes, but also how the processes themselves can be improved. It is also valuable to identify how data from outside the sales and revenue team can contribute to an enhanced planning process that also tracks execution to continually measure progress against goals and objectives.
How often do successful companies engage in sales planning?
As the saying goes, the only constant is change. Successful sales and revenue organizations anticipate and are ready to accommodate necessary adjustments to their plans. These changes will be driven by the gaps between actual and forecasted results that happen due to any number of reasons, including changing market conditions or sales staff fluctuations. Plans need to be continually adjusted in the face of change, enabling sales and revenue organizations to be agile and adaptive. These proposed changes are ideally driven by data and evidence, not just instinct and hunches. Facilitating these continuous adjustments requires that the supporting applications and technology can be easily configured by business users and that they are enabled with computational speed that results in near-real-time reporting.
Exclusive Q&A
Should sales organizations be more worried about closing deals rather than sales planning?
There is no argument that you must successfully execute to achieve sales and revenue targets. But success is measured by achieving objectives and goals. With omnichannel selling and more complex revenue and pricing models, sales and revenue planning leaves this less to chance. Having a well-constructed plan ensures incentives are in place to drive successful behavior, that territories are optimized to enable teams to succeed, and that quotas are achievable and mutually agreed upon with the revenue team. Plans enable all parties to understand where true north is and ensure the organization is primed for success.
What sales performance management processes are most used by best-in-class sales organizations?
As the buyer market is rapidly changing with customers demanding omni-channel, multi-touch engagement (including self-service) and more vendors adopting additional pricing models such as subscriptions, meeting the customer on their terms is more important than ever. Ensuring the right mix between named accounts, virtual and physical territories, and new self-service channels ensures that organizations are deploying resources to match customer expectations. Likewise, incentives need to recognize these changing buyer behaviors and allow sales organizations to be recognized for their contributions regardless of how the order is placed. Best-in-class organizations are aligning all three components of sales and revenue planning—territories, quotas and incentives—with overall objectives in mind that reflect changing buyer needs.
What role can AI and advanced analytics play in sales performance management, and what is necessary to make the use of AI a practical success?
Balancing omni-channel selling with physical and virtual territories and with named accounts is hard to achieve without assistance. Likewise, aligning quotas to targets is hard to optimize with many potential channels and sources of revenue, like renewals and expansion beyond traditional new business. AI can assist in optimizing across all these dimensions, but it is dependent on using timely and accurate data. This is why it is important to ensure that data is not buried in siloed applications but is instead utilized from source systems such as those in Finance and HR, in addition to historical sales actuals.
What metrics should organizations track to ensure plans are having the desired impact?
Although measuring the success of the sales and revenue organization can be as straightforward as “Did we make or exceed our target?” any new revenue planning application and technology needs both a strong business case and a way to ensure progress is being made along the way. The best approach to developing a business case is to identify where a new approach and technology will contribute to improved outcomes. Measurable improvements such as increased average deal size, shortened sales cycles, more timely and accurate revenue projections, or improved sales team retention rates are key sources of value for the project.
On the implementation side, it is important to recognize that successful projects are partnerships where technology providers and implementation partners guide not just how to automate current processes, but also how the processes themselves can be improved. It is also valuable to identify how data from outside the sales and revenue team can contribute to an enhanced planning process that also tracks execution to continually measure progress against goals and objectives.
How often do successful companies engage in sales planning?
As the saying goes, the only constant is change. Successful sales and revenue organizations anticipate and are ready to accommodate necessary adjustments to their plans. These changes will be driven by the gaps between actual and forecasted results that happen due to any number of reasons, including changing market conditions or sales staff fluctuations. Plans need to be continually adjusted in the face of change, enabling sales and revenue organizations to be agile and adaptive. These proposed changes are ideally driven by data and evidence, not just instinct and hunches. Facilitating these continuous adjustments requires that the supporting applications and technology can be easily configured by business users and that they are enabled with computational speed that results in near-real-time reporting.
Stephen Hurrell
Director of Research, Office of Revenue
Stephen Hurrell leads the Office of Revenue software research and advisory expertise at ISG Software Research and guides leaders in the applications and technology for buying and selling products and services to maximize revenue. His topics of coverage include digital commerce, partner management, revenue management, sales engagement, revenue performance management and subscription management.