Businesses that don’t forecast sales inevitably fail
small business sales forecasting software
More than 50% of businesses don’t survive more than 5 years. Head over to government census or Depart of Industry web sites and if you look at the detail you will see irrefutable evidence
The industry experts propose the reason for this tragedy is the failures just ran out of funds. This lack of detail is not very useful and so I decided to look for those directly and indirectly involved in failed businesses to see if I could discover the details, establish any consistent reasons for failure and post them on the web in the hope that my insights would help others avoid a similar fate. I uncovered eight common reasons for business failure. Here are three of them:
No Vision, mission or strategy
“If you have not decided where you are going then how are you going to get there?” You must have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and how life will be for your business if you achieve it. To achieve anything you must have a strategy. Strategy is like a road map it shows you how to get there. It’s a structured series of activities. Strategy is only effective if it is translated into a business plan which can be used as a benchmark for business performance. A key instrument for tracking and measuring business perfomance is the sales forecast.
Lack of a system for marketing or sales
Marketing is about discovering markets and trying out strategies to position your offering in the minds of prospects and directing 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 refinement of the tactics you use to reach prospects. selling is the process of creating leads, forecasting sales and closing sales. In successful organisations a decent marketing and sales system is consistently supported by a well designed sales forecasting software system. The tools in these systems help you to track and measure the actions and results in the sales and marketing processes. These insights arederived from reports created by the software which can then be used to compare what was planned with what actually happened. To sum up what gets measured gets improved or discontinued. This is the essential formula for success.
Lack a system to get sales from their captive customer list
There is a well used phrase that eighty percent of your sales should come from twenty percent of your customers. Your focus is to achieve or surpass this figure. Customers who have previously bought from you are easier and cheaper to sell to than prospects that have not. A combination of decent web based crm software and sales forecasting software will give you the information of past activity and allow you to discover opportunities in your current customer lists.
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