Host Analytics Brings “Financial Intelligence” to Sales Planning Tool
New cloud-based EPM application streamlines sales forecasting and planning.
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Host Analytics has released Host Analytics Sales Planning to help organizations improve alignment and collaboration of their finance and sales teams. The new application gives sales professionals tools to more efficiently and accurately deal with sales forecasting and commission planning, and integrates with the Salesforce.com CRM platform.
Host Analytics helps sales teams transition from cumbersome spreadsheets to a modern, automated system that streamlines critical processes such as sales forecasting and trend reporting to territory, quota, and commission planning. It ensures that regular updates to sales forecasts are incorporated in finance and accounting processes so that organizations can make mid-quarter adjustments to the business, stay agile, and achieve predictability in their revenue and spending.
Finance professionals can use Host Analytics Sales Planning to close the loop between finance and sales by tying the sales plan to the corporate plan in one seamless system, and automate weekly sales forecasts in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and make updates quickly. The system can analyze how sales orders will actually convert into revenue with built-in financial intelligence.
Enhanced Forecasting and Planning
The new application meets a critical need that sales managers have today by helping them more effectively manage sales forecasting by providing automatic weekly snapshots and updates to sales stages with flow-through, discount modeling, and waterline forecasting. It provides integrated analysis of sales and marketing information including leads, opportunities, pipeline, and territory modeling and support for multiple direct and indirect channels, with deep, seamless financial analytics for Salesforce.com users.
Host Analytics Sales Planning also helps sales professionals move off Excel as their primary planning tool. Even large organizations with modern CRM systems frequently find themselves dependent on Excel for creating sales forecasts, modeling territories, analyzing performance and and estimating commissions.
Data Integration
Host Analytics Sales Planning includes AirliftXL, a data integration tool that allows organizations to reuse the best of what they already have. Many organizations have forecasting methodologies and key sales performance metrics defined in Microsoft Excel. With Host Analytics, sales teams can recycle their existing models and move them to a centralized, secure cloud environment. That includes formulas, formatting, metadata, and more.
Mixing and matching of CRM and ERP data in Excel makes it difficult for sales and finance to collaborate and answer questions about revenue, forecasting, staffing, and territories, according to Dave Kellogg, Host Analytics’s CEO. Host Analytics Sales Planning eliminates the sales and finance silos and provides an integrated view of revenue and sales performance that ties back to the corporate plan. “We can get your finance and sales teams out of wrangling data so that they can use analytics and advanced modeling to drive better enterprise performance,” Kellogg says.
To learn more about Host Analytics Sales Planning, visit http://www.hostanalytics.com/products/sales-planning.