Sales planning: Determining Resource Requirements and Availability

You have now completed some key documents involved in successful sales force planning. So far, you have:

• Developed a snapshot of the current environment

• Applied trend analysis to your snapshot to give you a vision of the future

• Determined prioritized corporate objectives

• Clarified short-term, intermediate, and long-term goals

• Created directional statements for your sales team

Identifying Key Players and Their Motivators

Now you are getting down to the wire in planning documentations. The next step is to realize that you can’t achieve all these wonderful goals by yourself or with only your sales team. You will need internal and external resources, and you will need to ‘‘name names.’’ For example, if you plan to increase customer acceptance of new products or services, you might need the following:

• Product management: To change pricing strategy

• Advertising: To provide effective push-pull marketing

• Finance: To develop some long-term, low-interest financing

• Order processing: To expedite orders for this product

• Customer service: To handle inquiries and service calls more effectively

But knowing which department to call upon will not lead to goal success. You will need to establish a relationship with key individuals within the department to gain their support. Consider specifically whom you might need now and in the future. This can often be more than one individual or function. For example, you may need an outbound telemarketing representative. But if you borrow this person from his or her current assignment, you’ll be impacting the measurements placed on that person and department by his or her manager. Always spend time getting to know the evaluators of the person or function you need. Remember, when you make even a minor modification, you are altering an entire web of linkages.

After you’ve identified the departments and key players, you need to discover what it is that drives their performance. In most cases, it will be the measurements with which they are evaluated at the end of the year. If you are to gain their total support, you must be willing to support their efforts, too.

Rechecking Prioritized Corporate Objectives

One final planning note. Your organization is always changing. The environment changes, the leadership changes, the customer base changes, the technology changes, and the needs of investors change. As you have seen in the scenario planning discussion earlier, the future may turn out to be very different than you had planned.

Schedule time to regularly recheck your short-term, intermediate, and long-term goals to assure that they are in complete alignment with ever changing business realities. Watch for the indicators that will tell you when a shift in direction is taking place and adjust accordingly. The last thing you want to do is find yourself traveling down the wrong path.

Key Rechecks

• Annual reports

• Quarterly reports

• Press releases

• Internal and external speeches by key individuals

• Outside evaluators (financial community and auditors)

• Changes in organizational mission and vision statements

• Your managers

• Your leaders

• Other department heads