The planning application Sales Planning allows you to optimize your customer relationships by focussing your sales efforts on the most profitable customers, customer groups, and products. Besides the operational planning of sales activities, Sales Planning allows you to reconcile your planning with your business planning and your global targets because different planners can plan at different levels of aggregation. For example, the sales manager plans at the product group and sales organization level and the sales employee at the product and sales office level. Quantities and revenues, sales and marketing costs, and contribution margins (after deducting direct sales costs and sales overheads) can be planned at all levels. Since planning uses both top-down and bottom-up planning procedures, the data at the different levels of aggregation remain consistent. To ensure that the plan data can be compared on the different levels, it is stored in different versions.

Although you execute sales planning in SAP Strategic Enterprise Management (SAP SEM), you call it up via an RFC destination from within SAP CRM. To do this, choose Sales ® Execute Sales Planning.

Planning applications in SEM-BPS are characterized by the fact that they are delivered with an example scenario, provided by Business Content in SAP BW and by example data.

For more information about the planning application Sales Planning, see Business Planning and Simulation ® Planning Applications ® Sales Planning in the SAP Library for SAP SEM.

The delivered example scenario for Sales Planning is structured for the following process flow:

1. Sales Planning sets out from the assumption that the actual values from the current year are to be taken as the template for planning subsequent years. Sales planning itself is performed in different levels by the different planners. Proposal values are created by copying the actual data and can then be adapted to meet expectations on all levels, such as by applying a revaluation for individual key figures. Likewise, planners have access to the Forecast planning function at all levels.
2. Global sales targets are planned by top management, typically in charge of setting planning figures across the company for the entire year. The figures are then distributed top-down to the next level of aggregation directly below.
3. Middle management - the individual sales managers - adjust the figures from top management for their sales organization. The figures are then distributed top-down again to the lowest level of aggregation.
4. The individual sales employees perform operational planning. They adjust the management figures for their sales office. They plan individual customer groups and product groups for the year and for each month. In this process, the annual figures are distributed to the months and adjusted.
5. The sales managers combine the figures from the individual sales employees at the sales organization level and then adjust these figures. They compare the planning figures at the different hierarchy levels and decide whether further iteration of the planning process is necessary.

The following graphic exemplifies the distribution of tasks in a typical planning process: