By Fortune Alexander, Sr. Director, CX Product Strategy, Oracle

As a sales leader, are you haunted by your annual Planning process? Do you cringe when your CEO or CFO asks you when the Sales Plan will finally be ready? Does your Head of Sales Ops threaten to quit during the planning cycle? If so, you’re not alone. 

Most sales organizations take weeks, even months, to produce their sales plans. In fact, only 28% of companies have incentive compensation plans, territories, and quotas ready on day one of a new fiscal year, according to a survey by WorldAtWork. When sales reps don’t get their plans on time, it stalls momentum and creates a drag on productivity.  

The Sales Planning process is complex. The challenge is to optimize sales territories, quotas, and comp plans so that they can actually deliver on the overall revenue target. To do this, sales ops teams typically spend weeks cranking through complex spreadsheets with complicated formulas which are rolled-up across your Sales organization – several times over. These spreadsheets invariably get out of sync, take days to reconcile, and prolong the process.    

To reign in the chaos, some forward-thinking sales leaders have started to invest in sales planning tools. These tools, collectively called sales performance management (SPM), make the planning process more efficient. But advanced sales organizations want more–they need a planning tool to help predict optimal outcomes.       

Here’s the good news. Oracle just released a “next generation” sales planning solution that helps you build even smarter sales plans. Oracle Sales Planning uses advanced analytics and statistical methods to create predictive models that help steer your planning decisions. This prescriptive application enables your entire organization to work collaboratively throughout the planning process. And it’s pre-built using best practice planning methodologies, so it’s faster to get up and running. It also lets your power users access the app via Microsoft Excel.  

Even better, your CFO will also love the fact that Oracle Sales Planning is built on Oracle’s EPM platform. This allows for seamless collaboration with your Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) team who are typically responsible for integrating the Sales Plan with the Annual Financial Plan. The end result is that you get rid of the sales planning nightmares and make your CFO a hero as well.