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What "Sales Planning" Actually Means, and Why It Made Me Everyone's Least Favourite Call

 

What "Sales Planning" Actually Means, and Why It Made Me Everyone's Least Favourite Call

When people outside Korea hear "sales," they picture one thing. Someone in a room with a customer, closing a deal, shaking hands. That is a real job and I've written about the people who do it — the ones who go collect the money, who sit across from a dealer who can't pay, who buy dinner they weren't supposed to buy.

That was never actually my job. I sat one level back from all of it, in a role that doesn't have a clean English name. The closest is sales planning, sometimes sales support. What it actually meant, most days, was being the person nobody on the sales floor was ever happy to hear from.

What the job actually was

If I had to put it in one sentence: my job was to make sure the sales team could sell, and then check whether they had.

That split into pieces that don't sound like each other at all. Pulling apart the numbers to see where the business was actually working and where it wasn't. Building the policy that told the sales floor what to sell, at what price, on what terms. Then watching whether that policy was actually followed, because a policy nobody follows is just a document.

And underneath all of that, the parts that never show up on an org chart slide. Somebody has to enter the order. Somebody has to make sure the goods actually go out the door once the order is placed. Somebody has to track whether the money that was supposed to come back in for that order has actually arrived. That somebody was, more often than not, my team.

So a sales planning office sits at a strange angle to the rest of the company. Sales makes the promise. We make sure the promise was structurally possible to keep, and then we're the ones who find out first when it wasn't.

The friction was built in, not accidental

I want to be clear about something, because it would be easy to make this sound like a personality conflict, and it really wasn't. The friction between sales planning and sales was structural. It was going to happen no matter who was sitting in either seat.

Target-setting was one of the two places it always showed up. We'd come in with a number built from the data — what the market could actually absorb, what last year's pattern suggested, where the growth realistically was. Sales would come in with a very different number, usually lower, built from having to be the ones who actually hit it. Neither side was lying. We were both right, from where we were each standing.

The other place was receivables — chasing down the money owed on sales that had already happened. This is the part that connects directly to something I wrote about a while back, the story about going out to collect an unpaid note. From where I sat, in planning, an overdue account was a number on a report, and it needed to move. From where the salesperson sat, that account was a relationship they'd have to keep selling to next quarter. We were both doing our jobs. We were just optimising for different things, and there was no format of the report that made that disagreement go away.

What it actually felt like, most days

I won't pretend there's a dramatic story here the way there was with the bounced note or the noraebang. Most of the job was quieter than that — pulling numbers, building a policy document, sitting in a room while a sales manager explained, again, why this quarter's number couldn't be what the data said it should be.

But there's a specific feeling that came with the moments it worked. Revenue up, costs down, in the same quarter, and the numbers actually holding when you checked them again a month later instead of quietly sliding back. That's the whole job in one sentence, really — get both of those lines moving in the right direction at once, and get them to stay there.

It's not a job that gets you thanked very often. Sales gets thanked when a big account closes. Nobody throws a party because the receivables aging report improved by four days. But when both numbers moved together and stayed moved, I knew it, even if nobody else in the building particularly noticed.

Why I'm telling you this

Most of what I write here is a moment — a night at a noraebang, an afternoon at a bank. This one is different, and I think it needed to exist, because everything else on this blog was built by someone doing this job. The targets, the policies, the receivables tracking that decides who gets sent out to collect and when — that machinery sits underneath every other story here. I just don't think anyone had described what the machinery actually was.

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