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Business Planning > Business Plans

Business Plans

Use the Business Plan pages to create, update, and track business plans for accounts, contacts, or products. A business plan allows sales organizations to set strategic goals (for example, revenue targets) and action plans to achieve those goals, in the form of objectives, activities, and opportunities.

You can use business plans in a number of ways to accommodate company-specific planning processes. For example, you can create plans for individual accounts (for example, at the headquarters or territory level), or for a number of accounts (for example, all accounts in a sales representative’s territory). You can create plans for contacts independent of their account affiliation, which is useful for managing relationships with key-opinion leaders, whose influence in an industry or field extends beyond their own account affiliation (for example, an influential medical researcher). You can create plans for products, for instance, to plan the launch of a new product that will be sold to multiple accounts. For all these business plan types, the planning horizon can be short or long term. The business plan type is based on company-defined planning periods, typically months, quarters, and years.

Users can create hierarchies of business plans. A given business plan can have multiple child plans. Furthermore, a given plan can have associated objectives (for more information on objectives, see Objectives). A business plan sets high-level strategic goals, such as a revenue target. However, an objective sets a tactical goal, such as completing a number of sales calls, or attaining a certain number of new prescriptions at a medical practice.

Using business plans, you can integrate customer relationship management with business-planning tasks, workflows, and deliverables during the business-planning life cycle. By supporting the creation and management of account plans, a business plan supports selling to accounts and managing sales. A business plan consists of some general, plan information, and includes related plan objectives, opportunities, and activities. This plan information is also related to accounts because a business plan can be created for one account, for example, an account group parent and applied to a number of other accounts in a group.

NOTE: Your company administrator determines which tabs are available to you. If your job responsibility does not include tracking business plan information, the Business Plan tab might be excluded from your setup.