Market-driven sales forecasts
Without sales, you have no business. Sales forecasts matter. But they need to be credible and convincing.
The secret is to lay out your sales forecast in a market context. This will give you a market-derived perspective on its achievability. It’s a ‘top-down’, market-driven approach. The ‘bottom-up’ approach, where you set out the specific initiatives planned for developing business in each of your segments, can then be added to get total revenues in each segment.
Deriving market-driven sales forecasts is best done by assessing average change over a fixed period of time, typically a three-, possibly a five-year, time frame. You’ll relate your forecast sales growth to medium-term trends in the market over that time ...
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