SMP Tips and Tricks: Successful Goal Planning

It’s hard to believe summer is coming to an end, and we all know what that means….planning for next year is just around the corner. So, in this month’s tips and tricks, we’re going to focus on Goal Planning!

SMP provides an easy way to manage your organization’s goals for current or future years.  You can set goals by customer or at the product level.  And, you can use profile fields, customer lists, branches/territories or account manager options to query upon smaller target groups of customers to make planning seem a little less overwhelming.

Here are some tips from our Support Team on successful goal setting:

• Set a definitive start and end date to your planning cycle and communicate these dates to your team early so they can plan ample time to complete their goals.
• At the start of goal planning, use the “adjust all” function in the Goals form to set a standard growth rate for a selected group of customers (or all customers) with a couple clicks – this can help get the sales team started on planning, and can help management set a “minimum growth” percentage baseline for goal sell, potential or GP.
• If your team works better in spreadsheets, use our Offline Goal Setting process instead of manually setting goals in SMP. Worksheets can easily be uploaded after goal planning is completed in our Offline Goal Setting Excel workbook.
• Use the SMP Web Administrative Utility to lock goals after your planning period.  This will help ensure goals are not inadvertently edited or deleted outside of the planning period.
• Use Reports to export your Goals to Excel so you can save your data for later reference.
• Monitor your progress toward meeting your goals throughout the year in the Market Analysis form.  In Market Analysis, you can “turn on” the column to show your annual goals, and/or you can use the “total sell as a % of goal sell” or “total GP as a % of goal GP” to determine how close you are to meeting your annual goals at any given time.