Sales Forecasting And How Sales Force Automation Makes This Tedious Task Simpler
Sales Forecasting And How Sales Force Automation Makes This Tedious Task Simpler
"Sales force automation" is one of those industry buzzwords that gets thrown around a lot by business experts and corporate management alike. This is mainly due to its relatively recent introduction to the industry and its even more recent general acceptance as a truly useful strategy for companies to follow in attempting to streamline their processes, increase productivity and lower costs. Automation of the sales force also goes hand-in-hand with sales forecasting, because sales forecasting is directly dependent on the results generated by the efforts of the sales department.
There is nothing new in the idea of forecasting sales, and any person engaged in some way in a business is also engaged in the activity of forecasting sales whether he is doing so at the level of corporate management and thinking about the sales figures for the next quarter or simply an entry-level employee spending his lunch break wondering whether the company will do well enough in the near future to warrant him receiving a raise. Without proper sales forecasting, a business would be blind, unable to guide its actions in an informed manner, and instead simply stabbing in the dark for suitable production figures and sales estimates to present at the next shareholders' meeting.
This would be a terrible situation for a company to find itself in, and some companies even have entire departments dedicated to tracking the company's performance since the day it was set up in order to provide accurate estimates of the company's performance in the near future.
Forecasting sales is a task that is highly dependent on having access to large quantities of information, and also being able to process that information from raw data to figures that are useful in informing the management decisions of a company. With sales force automation, which typically involves the integration of sales force automation software into the entire sales process, access to the necessary information and the subsequent processing of that information is made much easier by being converted to an automated process.
With processed figures readily available by means of sales force automation software, corporate managers are able to devote their time to more important tasks such as assessing the state of global markets and predicting whether their products stand in good competitive stead or are on the brink of being pushed out of the running by more modern offerings from rival companies.
This sort of forecasting is absolutely essential for corporate management to better determine the direction of the company, and could very well mean the difference between the continued success of the company or an eventual descent into bankruptcy and failure. A company that choose to use the proper software for forecasting sales, however, stands to benefit greatly in a few important ways. The first is that shareholders are always pleased when forecasted sales figures turn out to be accurate, and also that the company will likely match its supply to the forecasted demand, and if the estimate of demand is accurate, the company will be able to maximize its profits while minimizing costs and wastage.