Sales planning is NOT a pipeline management or forecasting tool, but a planning and risk assessment. It enables you to sense check whether you have enough opportunity to meet your target and errs on the side of caution. We use a process that is intuitive and how our sales brains works
Sales planning is not about pipeline management, but a focus on developing a plan to ensure you hit your targets and carry out a risk assessment so no stone is left unturned.
Contracted and assured (maintain)
REMEMBER ABOVE THE LINE NO SALES EFFORT REQUIRED – this includes:
- Booked/invoiced revenue
- Multiyear deals & contracted revenue
- Existing product run rate
New business identified (win)
- This is our pipeline, opportunity already identified
- We do a risk assessment on these based on Ansoff theory
- This really airs on the side of caution; we may do better than that
Contracted but in jeopardy (defend)
Deals that have been agreed and counted in the maintain box – This can be because they have got stuck at legal, a change in the DMU, project may get cancelled or run over to the following financial year.
New business not yet identified (identify)
We now do the calculation to identify our GAP
Target – Maintain – Defend (after 50% risk applied) + Pipeline post Ansoff = GAP
Unfortunately, the GAP is not the amount of pipeline we need to identify, it depends on the type of clients you are selling to so we need to find 2x,3x,5x or 10x based on the Ansoff ratios
Once we have identified our GAP we identify the strategies to fill the GAP
This makes us think and plan
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