When it comes to sales, poor planning cycles hamper its growth, threaten successful sales and even drive away the best sales leaders that organisations have. In today’s economy, it’s most important for businesses to focus on driving top-line revenue growth and enhancing productivity with a holistic view of their entire sales activity.

Enterprises can take a new and effective approach to enhance the same, by implementing integrated sales analytics and planning solutions to further help their salespeople reach quotas and improve their profit margins per target market. One such solution to shorten the sales cycle is IBM Planning Analytics, which lets businesses track and analyse sales rep performance, and sales capacity data in real time.

Deploying the tool helps organisations in using the power of AI to gain an in-depth understanding of businesses and their target customers, optimising KPIs, increasing lead generation, and driving new business.

How firms can plan and analyse their sales optimally

What businesses can do to both shorten their sales cycle and increase their productivity through tools such as IBM Planning Analytics is:

Gain a 360-degree view of sales operations. Sales teams in businesses can get real-time visualisation of sales targets, sales quotas, capacity and incentives to optimise effective sales plans, enhance productivity, and reach revenue targets. Enterprises can also link their sales planning processes to business drivers in other departments—such as finance, operations or CRM—for a single, consistent view of sales metrics for all stakeholders.

Extract AI-infused sales forecasts. Organisations can also deploy AI-infused predictive forecasting to automate resource allocation and territory planning to get a competitive advantage and reach business goals. With the help of sales analytics solutions, sales managers can anticipate market conditions, tailor their sales plan template to the customer profile, set realistic sales goals, and create a roadmap for growth.

Use strong sales tools for territory management. Enterprises can also plan reliable territory forecasts. They can also ensure achievable quota targets and action plans for compensation with decision optimisation and a what-if scenario modelling. In addition, businesses can streamline territory planning by pulling together various data sources empowering sales team members to reach the ideal customer and achieve revenue goals faster.

Main benefits of deploying IBM Planning Analytics for sales teams

The IBM Planning Analytics tool can aid businesses to uncover and meet dynamic target audience needs with real-time analysis of sales data. It can help organisations move towards benchmarks powered by unmatched computational performance built on TM1 technology. This way, they can easily expand into new markets and promote new products. Here are its key benefits.

Align with the company mission: Organisations can extend their planning and analysis (xP&A) across all lines of business to ensure that their sales strategy and operational plans are aligned with the marketing strategy. The tool optimally supports transparency, collaboration, and alignment across the organisation’s team structures.

Continuously plan and adapt: Enterprises can also create continuous, real-time sales budgets and forecasts that look beyond the fiscal year. The tool helps evaluate short-term milestones and future prospecting goals, from monthly to daily to hourly updates. Organisations can also adapt their sales business plan as fast and frequently as needed.

Gaining accuracy and consistency: Sales teams can harness the power of AI and augment human intelligence to create more accurate, consistent, and timely sales forecasts without the need for a data scientist. The tool makes it easier for companies to gain the resource planning and management of sales reps needed to get new sales.

How IBM Planning Analytics can aid sales teams in a competitive business environment

As an AI-infused planning solution, IBM Planning Analytics automates workflows to make processes visible and provides all users with customisable analytics workspaces. AI tools support the natural language searching and multidimensional expressions based (MDX) queries for fast and powerful analysis, and embedded predictive forecasting capabilities enable more accurate forecasts.

Volatility, uncertainty and risk have been plaguing businesses for years – and they’re not going away any time soon. But most planning teams, whether in Finance, Operations, HR, Sales or elsewhere in the organisation, still spend an inordinate amount of time on manual, spreadsheet-based processes – collecting, consolidating and validating data before they can even begin to analyse it.

In response, leading organisations are seeking faster, more flexible solutions, such as IBM Planning Analytics with Watson, to deliver deeper insights into both operational and financial performance, which has multiple deployment options.

Join us at IBM Tech Connect – “Get beyond the Hype on Data Observability” on 6th December.