It’s month three of the quarter, you’re under the gun to deliver the forecast and set quotas. Your sellers aren’t putting everything in the CRM, you’re wondering how many IOs are outside the door waiting for the quarter to start and your Ops team is buried in spreadsheets compiling data to run a “bottoms up” business planning process. Sound familiar? What if you could quickly get a more accurate bottoms up view with a perspective on accuracy? Try these 5 best practices and get your quarterly business planning done more accurately in half the time.
- Run your “bottoms up” in your CRM – get rid of the spreadsheets and save the whole sales team time by running the process in your CRM. Leverage assets like account assignments, pipelines, historical spend to focus on quality input from the sales team instead of running reports, building spreadsheets and reconciling data.
- Compare your bottoms up to your forecast – putting the bottoms up side by side with the Q1 pipeline &bookings will expose gaps to drive the right conversation. Only by viewing both will you uncover spend assumptions, issues per account and drive better accuracy.
- Identify the sandbaggers, optimists and realists – intuitively you know who these people are, but do you know how much they’re usually off? The best practice is to have a view of historical accuracy from prior bottoms up exercises and actuals. Prior experience is that most sellers are 10-20% lower in their bottoms up vs. actuals, know the facts.
- Let managers make adjustments – loaded with insights like seller accuracy, account growth projections and comparison to forecast, get your manager’s judgment, after all, they know the people and the games better than anyone.
- Use business plans to drive accountability – after the quarter starts, don’t lose the bottoms up business plans. Integrate the planning into your forecast cadence so you can quickly triangulate progress vs. assumptions, know where and why you’re off, and drive action.
If you’re ready to break free from this cycle, contact us for a demo to see how boostr’s Business Planning Automation will fix your next quarter visibility.
