Sales planning is not only about forecasting revenue, but about shaping future success

Increasing revenue? A growing gross margin – that’s what everyone wants. Simply optimizing price × quantity, it’s a mathematical formula, how hard can it be?

Or is it? Ideally, you’d want to include your strategic goals in your sales planning. Which target groups do you want to sell to, which products should the organization sell more or less of? And the supply chain has a limit — not everything can be sold infinitely. Customizing your products may be necessary. Market and seasonal trends should also be included in the planning.

To what extent do you include generic and/or customer-specific discounts, transport costs, warranties? How detailed should the planning of your cost of goods sold be? All these decisions should be considered when setting up your sales planning process. And then there’s currency: sales managers probably want to plan in local currency. Sales planning is more complex than it seems at first glance.

At McCoy, we’re convinced that setting up a sales planning tool should be a collaboration between sales, finance and supply chain owners.

Our projects always start with an Explore phase

In this phase, we introduce users to the possibilities of the planning tool based on a simple sales planning setup. We discuss topics such as:

• the level of detail in sales planning

• the insights required for effective planning

• the various planning processes (e.g. strategic planning vs. the monthly forecast)

• the analysis and reports needed for planning, such as:

  • revenue or margin overviews per customer group

  • variances between plan and actuals, or forecast and plan

Our goal is to make the process as simple and transparent as possible — so that every user will happily embrace the new tool.

Ready to become more flexible and responsive?

Get in touch, we’re happy to think along.

Every planning challenge requires a tailored approach. See how we handle this in Workforce Planning and Financial Planning.

• Blog: Let your planning processes work together like a star team

• Blog by Jasper: about the Sales Planning scope item and our training (to be written)

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