small business sales forecasting software
More than 50% of businesses don’t survive more than 5 years. Check government statistics if you don’t believe me
The industry experts “broad brush” reason for death is the failures basically ran out of cash. This explanation is not very useful and so I decided to track down those directly and indirectly involved in failed businesses to see if I could discover the details, establish any consistent reasons for failure and present them on the blogosphere in the hope that my results would help others avoid a similar fate. I discovered eight consistent reasons for business death. Here are three of them:
No Vision, mission or strategy
“If you don’t know where you are going then how are you going to get there?” You have to have a clear view of what you want to achieve and how the environment will be for your business if you achieve it. To achieve anything you it is essential to have a strategy. Strategy is very similar to a road map it tells you how to get there. It’s a structured plan 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 instrument for monitoring business perfomance is the sales forecast.
Lack of a system for marketing or sales
Marketing is about identifying markets and testing strategies to position your offering in the minds of prospects and drawing 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 tactics you use to attract prospects. selling is the process of acquiring leads, forecasting sales and closing sales. In well run organisations a decent marketing and sales system is often underpinned by a well designed sales forecasting software system. Systems like these enable you to track and measure the events and outcomes in the sales and marketing processes. These insights arederived from reports produced by the software which can then be used to compare what you predicted would happen versus the real outcomes. In summary 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 known rule that 80 percent of your sales should come from twenty percent of your customers. Your focus is to achieve or surpass this number. Customers who have previously purchased from you are simpler and more cost effective to reach than prospects that haven’t. A combination of good web based crm software and sales forecasting software will give you the information of recent activity and allow you to uncover opportunities in your existing customer base.
