Businesses that don’t forecast sales inevitably fail
small business sales forecasting software
At least 50 percent of businesses worldwide fail in their first five years of existence. Check government statistics if you don’t believe me
The gurus most obvious reason for this tragedy is the unfortunate ones just ran out of funds. This lack of detail is not very useful and so I decided to look for those directly and indirectly connected with failed businesses to see if I could uncover the details, establish any recurring reasons for failure and publish them on the internet in the hope that my results would help others avoid a similar fate. I found eight common reasons for business death. Here are three of them:
No Vision, mission or strategy
“If you have not decided where you are headed then how are you going to get there?” You must have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and how the environment will be for your business if you achieve it. To achieve anything you it is essential to have a strategy. Strategy can be likened to a road map it shows you how to get to where you want to go. It’s a systematic series of actions. Strategy is only effective if it is translated into a business plan which can be used as a benchmark for business performance. A key tool for monitoring business perfomance is the sales forecast.
Lack of a system for marketing or sales
Marketing is about seeking out markets and trying out strategies to position your proposition in the minds of prospects and moving them into your sales funnel. Sales is about engaging the prospect and getting them to buy your product or service. Marketing is a process of measuring and improvement of the ways you employ to attract prospects. Sales is the process of creating leads, forecasting sales and closing business. In well run organisations a good marketing and sales system is usually supported by a well designed sales forecasting software system. Systems like these enable you to track and measure the actions and results in the sales and marketing processes. These insights arederived from reports produced by the software which can then be used to compare planned vs actual results. To sum up what gets measured gets improved or discontinued. This is the key formula for success.
Lack a system to get sales from their existing customer base
There is a common saying that eighty percent of your sales should come from twenty percent of your customers. Your task is to achieve or surpass this number. Customers that have already made purchases from you are easier and cheaper to sell to than prospects that haven’t. A combination of decent web based crm software and sales forecasting software will give you the information of recent activity and allow you to discover opportunities in your existing customer lists.
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