You don’t have a crystal ball – The CEO neither! Forecasting for targets

Estimating the future

Your personal future:
Making plans for your own future is enriching.
Without future and plans there is no hope, no dream, no value in life.

The Entrepreneur:
Writing a business plan for your startup or company is required and fruitful.

The CEO:
Estimating the forecast is needed for giving direction and steering the company.

The VP Sales:
Calculating the sales targets, based on extrapolations of the not yet finished year is subjective.

The Salesman:
Having to guess your own sales of next year is likely to be a waste of time as you could have been prospecting and selling.

Nobody can look into the future as we don’t have a crystal ball.
Why wasting all this time in forecasting?
And having meetings on these numbers?

Moreover:
Once the calculations done and agreed upon (at least from management side), these forecasted numbers will become your budget and the target that need to be achieved.

Remark: Don’t exceed on your budget to early in the year or your targets for next year will be much higher. Let management first calculate the budget for next year, then you achieve the target.

Hold on to the funnel based on your pipeline

The funnel or pipeline is the only guide there is for the future.
A funnel based on real projects with customer or leads.
A pipeline, that has been build upon qualified leads with the best estimation of value and chance to win.
No pipeline dream – but deals in the pipeline.
Keep your feet on the ground.
Real forecasts come from real people with real deals on hand.

You sales job is to aim to close the deals in your pipeline.
Forecasting is for C-level people.

Forecasting versus selling

Why do they all want you as Sales to have a crystal ball?
The crystal ball the C-level people in the company don’t have one neither.
It is just because they don’t know neither they ask you as you are nearer to the customer.

Thus they ask you to spend time on looking into the future for numbers they need to dream up.
Numbers you need to enter into a spreadsheet or CRM system.
Followed-up by meetings concerning these numbers, just to make sure you don’t under estimate.

All this is valuable time you could have used for calling leads, meeting with prospects and nurturing. customers. Thus the budget or targets cost a lot of money to define.

How much time do you need to spend on forecasting and budgeting?
How many times a year?
How much sales did you miss being occupied with non-productive matters for the CEO or VP Sales?

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