Sales & Marketing model
The Scenario
Our client is a leading FTSE100-listed financial services group offering a broad portfolio of insurance, pension and investment products and services. Every year they draw up a sales and marketing revenue and expenditure plan based on targets for the year.
The Challenge
Senior management needed to set and achieve revenue targets in order to meet investors’ expectations – and these targets had to be the starting point of the sales and marketing plan. However, the dilemma was to reconcile top-down targets with the necessary bottom-up planning that must take into account the effect of diverse and numerous factors. Complexities included:
- The business spans diverse business groups, products, sales territories (UK and overseas) and sales channels (direct and indirect)
- There are various marketing and sales initiatives that can be implemented (at a cost) to meet sales targets
- Varying business conversion rates
- The need to quickly re-plan during the year to take corrective action if necessary
- The cumulative and cross business aspect of error margins
- New product introductions with hard-to-predict results
In addition, they needed to ensure that the Sales and Marketing organisation had confidence in the plan and so felt responsibility to deliver.
The Solution
Paragon was engaged by the Business Support Manager to help automate their planning process for greater rigour and simplicity.
Paragon developed a model linking business units, products, territories and all the factors that affect the performance of each. The results are automatically presented in graphical and tabular form within the familiar Excel environment.
The model is flexible enough to quickly & easily evaluate a range of planning options to find & prove an optimum & robust plan. The options included recruiting new sales staff, paying special incentives, launching marketing initiatives, etc., the associated costs and the error margins. The model allows management to see how these ideas need to be combined to have the greatest impact.
The model was designed so that once the plan is in-progress the model can be used to refine the plan to keep the business on target.
The Benefits
The management team now have an effective top level sales and marketing planning tool. It can be re-used every year and can incorporate their experience of the impact of various initiatives from previous years.
Because all the high level factors affecting results are contained in the model, management can try and easily see the overall effect of various planning options – the time spent consolidating plans is greatly reduced due to automation and management can spend their time on where they can add real value – managing the business for performance.
The sales and marketing teams have confidence in the plans because they are constructed properly including their inputs and are thus realistic.
