How Anaplan eases your sales forecast

How Anaplan eases your sales control

Sales control is the rubber band between finance and sales. The insights it provides give you a better grip on the sales processes and the associated costs. Tools such as Anaplan help you with your sales control. This way you get more return from your partner channels and you can save on your clicks and bricks channels.

Anaplan helps you get the whole process around sales control right. This tool is based on one scalable platform; users, data and processes come together in one place to work out different scenarios, monitor outcomes and make informed decisions. This allows you to ease the entire process around sales control.

How does sales control with Anaplan work in practice?

1. Perform complex calculations in real time

Anaplan's robust computing power allows you to perform complex calculations in real time. As a result, information is instantly available to multiple users simultaneously. The impact of decisions is also immediately visible. For example, you can provide real-time insight into the effect of discounts on achieved commissions of the sales teams, in addition to their effect on the profitability of your organization.

These calculations can be implemented down to the lowest level, even for large volumes of records. For example, consider calculating the pipeline for all commercial people at the lowest product level. With these real-time insights, the business can act proactively, rather than reactively.

2. Accurate sales forecast

In addition to looking back, it is also possible to look ahead: forecast reports provide insight into trends over time, regions, teams and products. You can also use algorithms to fine-tune forecasts to make them even more accurate.

This helps you make decisions, manage budgets and allocate resources. The insights from accurate forecasts help the business act appropriately and early.

3. Different roles for different users

Anaplan can be accessed by multiple stakeholders simultaneously, allowing you to personalize access and insights. This creates a 'single source of truth', where only the relevant data is accessible per person. This allows multiple stakeholders to make decisions based on the same data, from one platform and one calculation method.

Moreover, using specific access rights, calculations can only be modified by people who are authorized to do so, which ensures the reliability of the calculations. In addition, rights can of course also be controlled at any other level, for example at the product hierarchy.

4. Data integration within Anaplan

By linking your source systems to Anaplan, changes are processed immediately and in real time. This eliminates time-consuming queries and manual operations to export data from source files and make them transparent. This makes the sales control process faster and more reliable.

5. Customize models and dashboards yourself

Anaplan is very user-friendly. End users can therefore make adjustments to models well independently, without help from IT or consultants. Drivers and reports can be modified independently by the end user, without the need for extensive technical knowledge.

In addition, the dashboards can be personalized; in practice, we often see that each function/department needs a different perspective of management information. As a user, you can also customize the dashboards to your personal preferences.

From sales control in Anaplan to Integrated Business Planning

With Anaplan, you can smartly set up sales control as an iterative and continuous process, where users have access to real-time insights and can customize the models and dashboards themselves. Once you deploy Anaplan for sales control, you can also extend its functionality to other industries. By merging plans, budgets and overall insights, the platform can thus be the unifying factor within your organization's entire planning process. With data from different business units - such as Marketing, Finance and Supply Chain - you can work toward Connected Planning as an organization.

Getting started?

Curious about Anaplan's capabilities when it comes to sales control? Watch the webinar on sales planning for retail stores. Or do you want to make a start with sales control within your organization? With our Sales Control template you can easily take the first steps. We developed this Excel template based on our practical experience.