You are ready to calculate sales forecasts, but you can’t get started. The data has not been submitted.
So, you spend time calling, emailing and perhaps even get up from behind your desk to walk down to the sales department and ask for the data.
Finally, the data arrives, and you begin to calculate.
Then someone knocks on your door and asks: “Could I just quickly go in and change a number…?”
Data is postponed again. And you?
You are waiting. Yet again.
Does this scenario seem familiar?
Our customers tell us that the biggest problem in the
budget process is not receiving data on time. Every month the finance function is like the morning traffic: slow and frustrating.
How to solve this? How do you get your co-workers to respect deadlines?
This article gives you five pieces of advice on what the company can do to have data delivered on time.
We are using the sales department as an example – not to hang the department out to dry, but to better illustrate this issue.
1: Let top management make it a priority
The head of sales may well be able to see the fairness in sales representatives delivering data on time and not slowing down the finance department.
However, it is one to have the head of sales agree to timely data delivery, but another to actually take action on this promise.
Good intentions tend to drown in resistance from the sale representative’s agenda. To them, the most important thing is to nurture customers and sell. This is what they were hired to do, excel at and are measured upon.
Why should they take time away from that to do a task that is both unrelated to their actual job and dull?
One way to deal with this resistance is to take it up with top management.
The CEO, CFO, and head of sales must set “Deliver data on time” as a priority for the entire organization.
A top priority will make it acceptable for the sales team to spend time on activities that are not directly linked to sales. And it indicates that it has consequences if they do not deliver data on time.
2: Offer a bonus for timely data delivery
It is important to have top management on board and a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is a useful tool to create action.
However, if you want to ignite true motivation, you need a carrot.
In this case, the carrot is a monetary bonus.
Salespeople, in particular, are no strangers to the concept of incentives, which can go a long way in convincing them to put in extra work.
Bonus systems can be set up differently from company to company. Here is an example of how it can be done: If a sales representative fails to meet the deadline on their forecasts for X number of times, it has Y effect on their bonus.
3: Make it as easy as humanly possible to hand in data
The first two suggestions focus on the sales department and how to activate them.
However, the office of finance must also contribute so sales representatives have the best conditions to meet the demands.
How do you do that?
First of all, the data entry and delivery must be easy. In fact, delivering data must be as easy as handling the coffee machine in the break room.
It is
not easy to log in to a fancy and unfamiliar accounting system with a difficult login process when you never remember the code and thus need to reset it every time.
Try thinking usability in relations to your co-workers who do not work with numbers and finance every day.
The best will be if the sales representatives were handed a spreadsheet in which they had to insert three numbers and return it. Another example would be using a template (in Excel or a
CPM solution) that is easy to use and has clear and self-explanatory buttons.
That said, you should be careful about over-simplifying it.
Usability and simplicity are a balancing act. Data that is too simple might lack detail and qualifications and thus be useless in a sales forecast.
Furthermore, data must be delivered with considerations.
There must always be thoughts behind which 5, 10 or 20 customers make up 80% of the revenue.
There must be considerations from every sales representative about why they will sell 5% more or less next year etc.
4: Set up automatic notifications
We all have busy days and even the best of us occasionally forget a task – especially if these tasks lie outside our areas of competence and interest.
A fourth idea to support the sales department is to send reminders and deadlines via emails.
Clearly, no one needs more emails, but clear communication can help sales representatives to better plan their schedules.
This means that you no longer need to hear excuses like “I forgot,” or “I didn’t know there was a deadline” or “I was on vacation.”
Automatic notifications work best. In Prophix, you can set it up in an
automatic workflow. It saves the finance function time because then you only need to set it up once.
You may consider adding a bigger pressure by Cc’ing the Head of Sales and perhaps even the Director of Sales on reminder emails to a sales representative who forgot a deadline.
Learn how your budget process becomes more efficient with automatic workflows
5: Have fast and efficient processes
The last suggestion in creating the best conditions for receiving data on time is to have fast and efficient processes. It should not take too long to create sales budget and sales forecasts with amount and revenue.
You should design your processes to be executed fast.
Short processes are a central condition to secure that no one makes change requests due to changes in the market.
A budget should not take more than 2-3 weeks and a rolling monthly forecasting process should be completed in 5-8 work days – here the data collection itself should not take more than 1-2- work days.
If you can’t handle a budget process or forecast process fast, delays and missing data will quickly occur.
Final remarks
It is not an easy process to change internal procedures – especially not across departments.
You increase your chance of succeeding when you access the problem from different angles, which also is reflected in the five pieces of advice:
- Management priority.
- concrete factors of motivation,
- usability,
- support and
- fast processes.
This means sales representatives do not feel tasks being forced upon them, but instead they experience being catered with financial incentives and support.
We hope you can use our advice.
Good luck on your journey to get data on time.
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