Business News

Wed Nov 29

How to Make Sales Forecasting Easy

Written by This article is brought to you courtesy of Spotcap.

This article is brought to you courtesy of Spotcap.

Let’s imagine that your business experiences a 10% rise in customer orders in the upcoming three months. If you haven’t had enough time to prepare, you might not be able to respond appropriately to the increase in demand and run into challenges with managing your work or cash flow.

How do you avoid this type of scenario? By buying time through a sales forecast.

Sales forecasts can have a significant impact on your company’s success. They allow you to predict upcoming changes early enough for you to be able to make the necessary adjustments. While the term may sound intimidating, it isn’t necessarily so - at its core, projecting the future of your business relies on finding repetitive patterns from its performance in the past. Here are three small tips that make the task easier to tackle.

Evaluate your past performance

The first step you need to take is to look at your previous figures. Dive into your accounting records and try to work with numbers that go as far back as possible.

This step is meant to improve your understanding of the ways your sales figures changed across the quarters and what that means for your business. If sales have steadily been growing, then it might be time to consider the need for extra staff or inventory.

Another benefit of evaluating your past performance is discovering seasonal changes. Look for any spikes and drops, especially if they repeat over the years - this can be caused by seasonal factors which you should incorporate in your future plans. Knowing when and why they happen will allow you to strategically adjust. A few helpful questions you may want to ask yourself are:

How were my sales numbers changing - were they growing / decreasing / fluctuating / staying the same?
Are there any particular periods of time that show higher / lower numbers?
Do these changes repeat over the years and what might be causing them?

If you’re working with large amounts of data, visualising the numbers can make it easier to find the patterns you’re searching for. You don’t necessarily need to purchase expensive software for the task, since programs that you most likely already have can get the job done - have a look at how we built a sales forecast template through Excel.

Consider your future prospects

Once you’ve examined your sales’ past performance, you’ve done half of the equation. The next step is to look forward and identify any promising leads. Are there any orders or deals currently being negotiated that you haven’t included in your data? Is there an opportunity that you have been working towards, which can give your business a boost?

While we would not recommend relying too strongly on promises which aren’t set in stone, you shouldn’t entirely ignore them either. Keeping them in mind when you do your sales forecast adds that extra layer of strategic information when you approach major financial decisions.

Be prepared to make adjustments

Keep in mind that a sales forecast can’t give you an exact snapshot into the future. Data will rarely be 100% accurate, but you can turn this to your advantage. For example, if you notice that you’re considerably falling behind on your targets, this can act as a trigger for you to stop and assess the situation.

While researching the reasons for this development, you might be able to discover changes in consumer behavior driven by the appearance of new trends in your industry, or a competitor launching an aggressive marketing campaign that is diverting their attention. Having a sales forecast in this scenario gives you the guide to refer back to and discover these signals.

Overall, use your sales forecast not as the ultimate prediction tool, but rather as a means to evaluate your performance. Take notes of any differences when the numbers don’t match. Did you struggle to meet your targets? Or, vice versa, did you surpass them? Aim to understand the reason behind these developments. With both positive and negative outcomes, ask yourself why it happened. Once you know the ‘why’, you can take measures to either avoid it or make it happen again.

Mon Nov 27

Shahid Majeed: Helping young professionals around the globe

Written by Tess Sanders Lazarus

After growing up in a poor village in Pakistan, Shahid Majeed developed a deep passion for creating change and inspiring others to become the world’s future leaders.

According to Shahid Majeed, owner and founder of E-LEAD Global Centre of Excellence for Leadership, Engagement and Development (E-LEAD), “having a tough start to life shouldn’t hold anyone back when building a career and being a leader in the future.”

“After going through my own hardships earlier in life, I want to inspire and motivate the younger generations to follow their passion to pave their own futures,” Shahid added.

“My dream has always been to launch my own business to create highly experiential and effective programs for future and emerging leaders.

“I didn’t have any financial or people resources when I decided to launch my business.

“To pursue this dream of mine I had to leave a salaried position of over 12 years and start E-LEAD from scratch. It was very challenging to convince people to buy into my passion and vision when I was only one person.

“I had to manage everything we achieved by leading from the front, inspiring and motivating people to be engaged with my passions.”

By building a strong sense of community and interconnectivity between the members of E-LEAD community, Shahid is paving the way for leadership programs across the globe.

“It is really important that the youth are supported and assisted when it comes to striving and achieving their best,” Shahid added.

“Helping them grow and flourish from the early stages of their professional lives will only lead to positive outcomes. Leadership development should not be limited to those who can afford it. It should be available to all people across all sectors of our society. Money, access and power should not dictate who accesses leadership development opportunities. Everyone is capable of becoming a great leader if given the opportunity to learn, be mentored and appropriately supported.

“Throughout my career I have founded and established a large number of leadership initiatives from scratch, including the inaugural International Leadership Development Program (I-LEAD) that brought together 13 of the world’s leading business schools from six continents to Australia including Wharton, Kellogg, MIT Sloan (USA), INSEAD (France), London Business School and Cass Business School (UK), Copenhagen Business School (Denmark), IE Business School (Spain), NUS Business School (Singapore), Wits Business School (South Africa), Universidad de Chile Business School (Chile), Auckland Business School (New Zealand) and UNSW Business School (Australia)”.

Shahid also founded the inaugural Graduate Student Association at the UNSW Business School, which was selected as the best club of the year within just the second year of foundation.

“Having worked for over 15 years for other organisations, I decided to take the plunge to launch a global leadership centre to make my dream into a reality.”

Drawing inspiration from the leading universities and business schools all around the world such as Yale, Harvard and Wharton, E-LEAD Global is continuously developing dynamic and contemporary experiential leadership programs.

“We are constantly thinking creatively to develop and launch new and vibrant initiatives,” Shahid said.

“In 2018, E-LEAD is launching a residential experiential leadership program (LeaderAction) for early career professionals, a graduate recruitment immersion and training program (GRIT) for university students along with a corporate partnership program to secure corporate sponsorship for E-LEAD programs.

“E-LEAD is devoted to developing and enhancing the capabilities, aspirations and impact of future and emerging leaders for active global leadership.

“All of our programs develop excellence in people through employing a holistic life-cycle approach by blending together experiential leadership learning and development with electronic engagement.

“Seeing E-LEAD become a distinctive centre of excellence in experiential leadership development for future and emerging leaders is where I see E-LEAD heading.”