CHAPTER 6

The Business Planning Process

The business planning process in sales management

The key activities of a sales team are developing and integrating business plans, negotiating with customers, collecting and processing orders, implementing plans, checking progress, and identifying corrective actions. These activities can be grouped into three fundamental processes with their respective supporting IT tools: (1) business planning, (2) order to cash, and (3) sales and operations planning. They are interrelated, but need to be analyzed separately for the sake of clarity.

Customers are the business planning units of the sales function, but when the trade environment is very fragmented distribution channels substitute customers as the planning ...

Get A Guide to Sales Management now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.