Why Sales Forecasting is critical for business growth?

Let’s first understand what forecasting is all about.

Forecasting is the procedure of making projections based on past and present data.

At a broader level, it is critical to understand the demand for your product in the market and understand what drives it.

What is the size of the addressable market and serviceable target market?

What is the buying pattern of the target market?

Are your product fits into their needs and wants? – these are some of the critical questions to ask to forecast the market demand.

Then comes the sales forecasting.

It helps you to predict and anticipate business growth in a particular period (monthly, quarterly and yearly) without which you cannot plan your key business activities like marketing, product stock maintenance, cash flow management, working capital requirements, hiring and so on.

Cash flow management is a lifeblood of a business and estimating it is critical for business sustenance.

It is also highly important to segregate definite and probable revenue.

How you manage the sales pipeline will also determine your forecasting.

• Does your sales team have enough qualified leads to touch their revenue quota?
• If not, can your marketing team generate and capture sufficient demand to enable the sales team?
• What are the other key leading indicators of revenue?

These are some of the questions you need to ask while doing the sales forecasting.

But, according to Gartner, 55% of sales leaders and 57% of quota-carrying salespeople lack confidence in forecast accuracy.

Why? mostly because they do not have proper systems and tools to guide them.

This forces them to do guesswork which results in inaccurate forecasts and brings unpredictability in achieving the revenue targets.

This is so true with small and medium businesses.

While the legacy CRM software companies like Salesforce provides the sales forecasting feature, it is only available in their enterprise plans which a small business owner cannot afford.

This is where UPilot’s proposition comes into play.

UPilot provides the most critical feature that is needed to predict and anticipate growth – Sales Forecasting at an affordable pricing plan for small, medium and fast-growing companies.

The best thing is it is available across all the pricing plans.

For more details visit - www.upilot.com