The Master Plan Guidance is where we specify the recommended frequency for each combination of segment - brand - channel in our plan, such that the total recommended contacts (or weighted recommended contacts) fit within the capacity estimated in the previous step.

Select Plan Guidance tab from the Master Plan chapter to access this section.

                                                                Plan Guidance tab

The Plan Guidance screen has 3 sections:

• Statistics - top row
• Planning Options - second row from the top
• Guidance Table - allows users to set frequency objectives by segment, channel and brand and to visualize such information. It contains 3 tabs:
  1. Segments - is the default tab and is where coverage and frequency objectives can be set and visualized at segment level
  2. Segment Groups - is the second tab and provides the same information from the segments tab but consolidated at segment group level and read only
  3. Insights - is the third tab and provides charts based on the planning done at segment level

Plan Guidance Statistics

1. Contacts Capacity for the cycle, as calculated in Capacity step - remember whether you used a simple sum to aggregate across channels or whether you used channel weights in the aggregation
2. Total Recommended Contacts represents the sum of all recommended contacts for all the customers that fall in the targeted segments, across all channels. In this calculation only the values/frequencies from the total rows are taken into account and NOT the frequencies set at brand level. If a specific customer falls into more than one segment then the number of contacts planned for that customer will be either the sum of contacts coming from each segment or their maximum depending on which option has been selected in the “Rep Plan Consolidation Option” drop list.
3. Weighted Recommended contacts, represents the sum of contacts by channel multiplied with the channel weight

<aside> 💡

NOTE that depending on the position through which you view the Plan, these numbers will change:

• a Global position (SFEM, BUD) will see the capacity of the entire team, and the Total/Weighted Recommended Contacts for the entire team
• a Rep position will see the average Capacity of 1 Rep and the Total/Weighted Recommended contacts only for the customer in that territory </aside>

Planning Options

Read Segments sub-page first

Calculate Data Using: primary address or targeted address

When viewing the Plan from a Global Position - across the entire team - we will count all the relevant customers in the selected segments irrespective of their address (brick), but when we look from a team level position - Rep or manager - we filter the customer universe and all the other numbers to account only the customers that are in the bricks allocated to that position.

However a customer may have addresses in multiple bricks and to avoid double counting we want to place the customer in one of the bricks, not in all of them.

To select which brick we should place the customers in we have 2 options to select from:

• Use the primary address of the customer to identify the right brick