Breaking Down Barriers: Unified Sales Planning for Optimal Revenue Performance

We've helped hundreds of organizations achieve their sales performance management (SPM) goals. In the process, we’ve noticed a common flaw: failed SPM approaches create information silos. These silos prevent finance and sales teams from properly collaborating, planning, executing, and adapting in pursuit of revenue excellence.

In this post, the first in a series on SPM, we’ll explore the critical role of unified sales planning in driving revenue excellence. We’ll cover common challenges, effective solutions, and how the right tools empower teams to align, collaborate, and adapt for success.

Effective Planning Across the Organization

Effective business planning requires more than just numbers on a page; it requires continuous execution, feedback, and adaptation.

Finance’s goal is clear: align plans with the business’s overall strategy while enabling enough agility to respond to market shifts.

To pull off such alignment, planning must be unified across departments, with a seamless flow of information between finance, operations, and sales. That endeavor requires planning based on actual data — always up-to-date, always available, and housed in one reliable platform.

The need for the Office of Finance to invest in tools that provide true unified sales planning is further underscored by OneStream’s recent research. According to the research, 72% of business managers expect chief financial officers (CFOs) to be “masters of everything,” highlighting the need for unified sales planning tools.

Yet CFOs cannot be the master of everything if everything is everywhere and barely held together by “digital duct tape.” (See Figure #1)

Figure #1: 72% of CFOs

In other words, many of the current solutions cause frustrations across the organization.

Frustrations with Current Solutions

Many businesses today still rely on fragmented planning systems that add complexity without adding value.

When relying on disconnected systems, businesses build "digital duct tape" solutions that patch silos of data together from various CRM, CPQ, ERP, and other tools. These systems get in the way of collaboration and slow down the organization’s response time. We’ve all seen what that means: delays, incomplete data, and a cascading planning process that threatens to break down at every level.

For example, organizations that manage their annual operating plan (AOP) without alignment to sales planning wind up with misaligned goals. Sales targets won’t match operational capacity, which causes a host of problems:

• Forecasting becomes unreliable when sales assumptions are disconnected from broader financial plans.
• Departments can’t co-ordinate effectively, leading to wasted investments or missed opportunities.
• Communication gaps emerge, creating confusion about priorities.

Ultimately, companies struggle to adapt to market shifts when annual plans and sales strategies operate in silos. The required alignment between finance and sales therefore simply can’t be achieved with outdated planning solutions.

In broader terms, OneStream’s Finance 2035 found that most CFOs believe the right technology is essential to business survival. (See Figure #2)

Figure #2: CFOs Believe

The Solution: Unified Sales Planning

By leveraging the infrastructure of the OneStream platform, our partner InfinitySPM built a sales performance management system that delivers true unified sales planning. The system allows our customers to eliminate digital duct tape for good. As a result, finance and sales can finally collaborate in the most effective way possible.

OneStream provides the data, security, and communication capabilities that support a fully integrated planning process. This approach is owned by the business — not IT departments or external providers.

Ultimately, InfinitySPM on the OneStream platform integrates top-down and bottom-up insights. This integration provides a unified perspective that allows the entire organization to collaborate and make informed decisions.

When empowered to plan → test → optimize, teams can respond quickly to new information. That ability ensures continuous alignment with business goals despite changes within the business or in the marketplace.

The results are dramatic.

At one customer with a sales team of 500+ people, the annual sales planning and sales goals process had been disconnected from the AOP process. Everything was also 100% completed in Excel. As a result, there was a disconnect between versions — causing endless headaches for everyone.

At another customer, compensation planning and payment had been partially completed in an offline system, downloaded into Excel, and manually run monthly. The sales team had 250+ people. Thus, finance and sales had no direct visibility into the compensation effectiveness of the core plan or the frequently introduced special incentives.

By shifting to a unified sales planning approach through OneStream, both companies linked their financial forecasts directly to sales incentives and operational goals. The result was improved visibility into performance at all levels, a seamless data flow, and greater agility in responding to market demands.

When planning and execution are aligned, decision-making and collaboration are enhanced across departments — which helps lead to achieving revenue excellence.

In the next post, we’ll discuss how the optimized incentives approach ensures your unified sales plan drives the right behavior to help your organization hit its revenue targets.