Sales Forecasting

 

To properly forecast sales potential, a company needs to understand how many prospects they have in the universe of companies that might buy from them.  A prospect is a company that knows your company, needs your service and will make a decision in the near future. Companies that may fit the profile of a company that can use your services are just names. Organizations make the mistake of creating sales forecasts and management decisions on the universe of names.

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One Path of Destruction in Sales Information Management

And then the ugly part happens – the database itself is deemed “ineffective”, and that is blamed on the salespeople, and the database, and everyone else that has come within a half a mile of it. The solution is to chuck out the old database and start over. The cost of doing this enormous, and it happens every day.

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Quantum Mechanics in Forecasting

Often when working with a sales or marketing manager in setting up their CRM system we will suggest setting up their Probability (of close) percentages in increments of 10, i.e. 0%, 10%, 20%, 30%, etc. Every once in while someone will say, "oh, come on, nobody can guess that close. "

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The High Cost of In-Sourcing

I recently worked with a company whose over-arching philosophy was to do everything in-house, presumably with the simple view that “We already have these people, and they have talent, so why should we spend additional money by outsourcing?” Or, in the case of technology, “We can figure out this problem on our own. There are lots of good resources out there.”

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