Sales planning software enables organizations to intelligently structure sales plans, such as territory management, quota allocation, and capacity management, to ensure sufficient resources are provided to effectively execute sales goals. Sales leaders use these products to predict sales performance better and align with other business units, such as finance teams, on business goals. These solutions provide businesses the ability to score accounts and carve sales territories based on various factors such as geography, company size, industry, total addressable market (TAM), or revenue to ensure accurate account segmentation and optimized territory coverage. These products also provide quota planning and management capabilities to set targets and monitor performance for each territory and sales representatitive. These tools can provide insight into sales capacity planning to better predict the performance of an organization based on the current headcount and past performance, as well as offer insight into the ideal number of sales representatives needed to meet or exceed goals.
Solutions in this category seek to ensure timely and consistent execution of sales plans, or provide scenario modeling capabilities to inform data-driven planning and execution. These products enable organizations to be agile and alter plans throughout the year to optimize market coverage and ensure adequate resources are provided to meet revenue targets. Sales planning tools are typically leveraged by sales leaders to better manage their workforce and business goals. Sales organizations often experience employee turnover, volatile forecasts, and gaps in market coverage; these tools enable organizations to be agile to navigate the constant hurdles faced by sales organizations and better plan to effectively meet objectives.
Sales planning tools often integrate with CRM software to pull and store sales data, as well as sales compensation software to automate the administration and payment of commissions. Sales planning products also integrate with a variety of other business support systems, including ERP software, HR software, lead-to-account-matching-and-routing software, among others for bidirectional flow of information. Sales planning software overlaps with sales performance management software as both can manage performance records for individuals and teams, but sales planning software extends further by providing territory, quota, and capacity management capabilities. Some of these solutions also offer capabilities of sales analytics software to forecast sales across territories and teams to ensure sales performance is meeting business goals.
To qualify for inclusion in the Sales Planning category, a product must:
Integrate with company’s CRM software to pull and store sales data
Provide territory planning features to carve sales territories based on a variety of factors as well as the ability to manage and alter territories throughout the year
Enable organizations to structure quota planning and target setting
Assist in sales capacity management to ensure optimal coverage of accounts and territories
Enables users to create and run “what-if" scenario modeling to inform their business decisions
Actively monitor performance data to identify deviations from plans and correct accordingly
Provide continuous planning features for organizations to alter plans and execute plan changes immediately
