July 3rd, 2025
Many companies that have SAP systems in use today utilize spreadsheets or other software vendors to manage their sales planning process. This results in silos of data and systems that don’t truly talk to each other. Utilizing Excel or other systems outside of SAP, quota plans can become quickly misaligned to the company goals. There are many sales planning processes that lead to poor outcomes. Those processes are:
- Quota
- Sizing and Scoring of Customer Accounts
- Segmentation of Customer Accounts
- Capacity and Productivity Planning
- Territory Balancing
Notice how each of these processes feed into each other:
If you are using Excel to try to manage this process, how are you ensuring that the data is calculated correctly and feeding into the next process effectively? How much time are your planning teams spending to acquire the data and plan the outcome which is ultimately your rep assignments and quota targets for the year? And perhaps most importantly, are you sure your manual Excel planning process or your outside system is aligned with the financial plan of your company?
Utilizing a centralized system where both finance and sales are utilizing a single source of truth for data, companies can ensure that the sales goals align with the finance strategies. CFOs can know that the CRO is working on the same plan. A study by a software company found that 45% of leaders say that sales and finance don’t even use the same tools for forecasting. So how are our sales plans going to align with the plan our finance team came up with?
Utilizing SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), you can leverage the power of moving from spreadsheets or other systems for sales planning to doing the planning in SAC. This can save costs (extra software, time), increase accuracy (human error for entry and calculations), allow for collaboration, and align finance and sales planning.
SimpleFi is building out solutions for each of the sales planning areas above within the SAP Analytics Cloud environment. Stay up with or ahead of the competition by moving to a system that talks with your finance planning system natively. Spend more time utilizing the data your system already has rather than manually compiling into spreadsheets or pumping it into another system that requires you to transform your data.
Author: Keith Jackson
Upcoming Session:
Learn more by attending our webinar on July 3rd, 2025. Hear from Keith Jackson, our Sales Performance Management leader as he takes you through SAP Analytics Cloud with SimpleFi’s SPM Platform.
*the content in this blog is the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the official views and position of SimpleFi or their strategic partners including SAP.
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