"What we anticipate seldom occurs, what we least expected generally happens."
Benjamin Disraeli
19th Century British Prime Minister
19th Century British Prime Minister
I was just talking about this with someone the other day telling them how I rarely get the projects I am all but certain will happen but do get many I assume will not.
Accurate sales forecasts are the underpinning of a company's business plan and yet as most sales managers will tell you, accurate forecasts is almost an oxymoron.
When it comes to sales your product may be straight line, commodity, predictable like that depicted in the above graph but I will bet most aren't that way particularly in today's economy.
Still, companies need to have a pretty good idea what their revenue line will look like. What do you do to develop as accurate a revenue picture as possible?
Accurate sales forecasts are the underpinning of a company's business plan and yet as most sales managers will tell you, accurate forecasts is almost an oxymoron.
When it comes to sales your product may be straight line, commodity, predictable like that depicted in the above graph but I will bet most aren't that way particularly in today's economy.
Still, companies need to have a pretty good idea what their revenue line will look like. What do you do to develop as accurate a revenue picture as possible?
One of the other posts talked about how people don't like to be tied down to specifics. Well nothing is more specific than estimating sales.
ReplyDeleteI'm a sales manager and while I do my best to give accurate forecasts, anything less than 95% accuracy results in negative comments from our CFO.
They are called "forecasts" for a reason. Deal with it!
There can be some "science" to it although few approach forecasting that way.
ReplyDeleteStart with listing known facts followed by assumed facts and finally things that are not known, cannot be assumed but are important. Fill in the blanks and forecast based on that.
See Bill we did listen to you and better still it works.
Thank you Franklin.
ReplyDelete