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 official common reason for death is the unfortunate ones just ran out of funds. This description is not helpful and so I decided to track down individuals directly and indirectly involved in failed businesses to see if I could determine the details, establish any recurring reasons for failure and post them on the blogosphere in the hope that my results would help others avoid a similar fate. I discovered eight common reasons for business failure. Here are three of them:

No Vision, mission or strategy

“If you don’t know where you are heading for then how are you going to get there?” You must have a clear view of what you want to achieve and how circumstances will be for your business if you achieve it. To achieve anything you need a strategy. Strategy is very similar to a route map it tells you how to get to where you want to go. It’s a structured list 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 tracking and measuring business perfomance is the sales forecast.

Lack of a system for marketing or sales

Marketing is about identifying markets and trying out strategies to position your offering in the minds of prospects and directing them into your sales channel. 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 getting leads, forecasting sales and closing sales. In successful organisations a good marketing and sales system is usually 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. Outcomes arederived from reports created by the system which can then be used to compare what was planned with what actually happened. The point I am making is what gets measured gets improved or discontinued. This is the critical formula for success.

Lack a system to get sales from their current customer list

There is a well used phrase that 80 percent of your sales should come from 20% of your customers. Your job is to achieve or exceed this figure. Customers who have previously purchased from you are easier and cheaper to sell to than prospects that have not. A combination of effective web based crm software and sales forecasting software should give you the knowledge of historical activity and enable you to uncover opportunities in your current customer base.

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