Did you know?

• More organizations fail than succeed implementing their strategy
• Industry studies suggest that majority of executives (64% of a recent Booze & Company Inc. survey) say that their biggest frustration factor is “having too many conflicting priorities.” followed by these executive challenges:

a) Ensuring that day-to-day decisions are in line with the strategy (56%)

b) Allocating resources in a way that really supports the strategy (56%)

• The HBR estimates the ROI from traditional planning approaches to be 34% or less.
• The Economist Intelligence Unit estimates that organizations realize just 60% of the potential value of their strategies.
• Kaplan & Norton research shows that 90% of organizations fail to successfully implement their strategies

Developing Operational plan remains an uphill taks for companies due to a lack of initiation point for the entire exercise. The challenge is further complicated by the sheer complexity, size and time required to marry Key result areas and the planning underneath.

In the current economic downturn executives are struggling with reduced revenues and loss of market share. Because of this situation they are forced to lay off workers and cut costs. Leaders need to identify new markets, fexplore new opportunities and innovate to grow. This is compounded by the need to grow YoY, from both internal and external stakeholders.

Companies urgently need help in identifying new markets of opportunity in this tough economy. Just cutting costs is not going to ensure success or in some cases even survival. To succeed Entrepreneurs, leaders and Managers are looking to embrace ways that will help them exploit new opportunities across verticals, markets and customers.

One of the most important tools in the hands of leaders is “EFFECTIVE PLANNING PROCESS”. An Effective planning process is to help allocate available resources to achieve established goals. In order to provide accurate sales pipeline and revenues and to maintain a competitive position in the market, companies are turning to various forecasting methods that provide an enterprise-wide real time data flow thereby creating authentic view of future revenue. Thus improving the focus of the sales team towards sales and related activities.

However following needs to be achieved:

. First, it is necessary to address the very nature of Planning and forecasting. The act of predicting how much revenue, profit or throughput an organization will realize during a given period of time.

. Deploying formal analytical tools and processes in support of sales forecasting achieve stronger results than companies not supporting the same type of sales enablement. If the question should arise, “does it really matter if we accurately forecast our sales activity?,” various Independent studies have shown that top- and bottom-line financial results, as well as revenue growth and effective conversion of sales lead, are all positively impacted by effective planning process.

. Leading companies create an environment for sales effectiveness and use these to achieve better business results.

At Monk we use 3 key metrics to distinguish between leaders and followers in a market place:

1. Customer Retention Rate
2. Change in Revenue Performance Year on Year
3. Typical Sales Cycle (reduction or increase in closing sales)

Having Said that how do Enterprise drive drive higher accuracy from their revenue Planning Process/ Forecast??:

Gauging revenue forecast accuracy itself is a crucial metric to apply to any discussion of the business value of improving the results. As discussed above, inaccurate revenue forecast can lead to inefficient resource planning including, manufacturing, inefficient SCM, larger than required human resources, and expensive to non essential purchasing. Its is equivalent to shooting in the Dark, if you are lucky you might hit bulls eye..but does that really happen?

Leading companies consistently better their revenue forecasts, they are regularly more accurate with than the followers, at every step of the sales process and most of the time. This is true, even out to six months– for the kind of complex, –long-sales-cycle pursuits that often require team-based selling, customized deliverables and high average selling prices.

Following are the 5 Ingredient for an Effective Revenue Forecasting

1. Process: Organization’s approach to executing day to day tasks
2. Organization:Focused Goals and collaborations amongst key stake holder
3. Knowledge management (contextualizing data and exposing it to key stakeholders)
4. Technology/service (the selection of the appropriate tools and the effective deployment of those tools); and
5. Performance management (the ability of the organization to measure its results to improve its business).

These characteristics serve as a guideline for best practices, and correlate directly with Best-in-Class performance across the key metrics.

To achieve Best-in-Class performance, companies must:

• Define Key Steps to Success: Provide cross-functional access to the sales forecast, enabling other line-of-business leaders to make better departmental decisions
• Measure Twice Cut Once
• Conduct “Closure Barrier” Analysis: Analyze various stages where sales get stuck for too long
• Standardization: Create Standardized ranking to classify all sales lead
• Use of Technology: There are various cost effectivecloud based apps for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Sales Force Automation (SFA)
• Human Factor: Effective training to sales and Operations team to use technology as a tool
• Post Deal Analysis: Compare to Pre Sales forecast…will help create better conversion to Sales Funnel.