B2B selling involves a myriad of choices about how to engage with customers. Sales organizations and salespeople spend an enormous amount of time planning which customers and prospects to spend time with and what messages to focus on. Typically, a high-level annual plan anchors more detailed quarterly plans which get broken down into even more granular periods. Salespeople use the plans to cascade tactics for specific customers into daily sales activities. But this paradigm is changing as a nimbler customer engagement model of “planning while doing” emerges.
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Summary.
Traditionally, sales and support groups spent months creating annual plans defining customer, product, and activity priorities for the sales organization. These plans guided many annual decisions, including sales force size and deployment, sales goals, and sales incentive plan design. At many companies, these long-term plans are being supplanted by continuous, daily, adaptable plans, much of it driven by advanced AI and analytics. In particular, these changes affect two key groups: people who support sales planning and sales managers. While these changes don’t mean the end to sales planning, they do mean a blending of sales planning and execution — and a fresh mindset.