Traditionally, sales planning involved juggling multiple Excel spreadsheets, which were often hard to find and difficult to read. Salesforce changed this in Summer 2023 by launching Salesforce Sales Planning. This tool simplifies the process, allowing users to manage versions easily and store all sales plans in one accessible place.
Let’s dive into what Salesforce Sales Planning offers and its features.
Creation of a Sales Plan
You have four options to create your sales plan:
1-Using Territory Management: If you already use territory management, you can assign records (let’s say accounts) to different sales territories with just a few clicks. Ensuring Territory Management is properly set up is key to creating a good sales plan.
Based on Role Hierarchy: By using the role hierarchy you can define how the records will be assigned depending on the user's position in the hierarchy. This is particularly useful when you would like to allocate a budget by department or set sales goals by sales division. Again, before implementing this one you will want to make sure the users’ role hierarchy is properly set up first.
Based on Management Hierarchy: This uses the 'Manager' field on the User records. If you set up a proper management hierarchy then you can plan at a user level. Be sure to remove any people from the hierarchy who aren’t involved in sales. Again, make sure the Manager field is properly filled for all users before you get started.
Create a Sales Plan from scratch: Use this method only if the other three don’t work for you. It’s the most work because you have to manually create a hierarchy in a CSV file, import it, and then set up the rules for assigning records.
Allocation Metrics
What is it that you want to allocate? Is it the sales quota? Is it a budget? Is it a headcount? Or maybe you would like to allocate more than one metric.
Salesforce Sales Planning allows for the distribution of any quantifiable metric through your established hierarchy. You can define one or several allocation metrics depending on your needs.
Records Assignment
If you have selected to use territory management, role hierarchy, or management hierarchy, and the hierarchy is properly set up, then the work is pretty much done here since the assignment rules are created automatically and the records get assigned right away.
You can always tweak these rules or add exceptions to better fit your needs.
For example, if a sales rep in California has a special connection with a customer in Florida, you can adjust the records to reflect that unique situation.
Allocations
You can do the allocation of the metrics (quota, budget, headcount…) to the different nodes in the hierarchy manually, equally across nodes, or proportionally to a field value (let’s say annual revenue or population).
Most likely, you would like to distribute your metrics proportionally to a field’s value because the nodes have different needs and potentials.
Once you have allocated all your metrics, you have your sales plan in place and you know what targets each department/user/region has to hit in a given period.
Keep Updated
Since Salesforce Sales Planning is a new tool, Salesforce will update it monthly until the end of 2024. These updates will incorporate feedback from users to improve the tool. Keep an eye on these changes to make the most of Salesforce Sales Planning.
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