• The Business plan
• Marketing and Sales Planning
  • Marketing Strategy
  • Lincolnshire Research Observatory
  • Marketing Plan
    • Analysis for your marketing plan
    • The Four and Seven Ps
    • Developing a Pricing Strategy
    • What else should be in the marketing plan?
  • Forecasting and planning your Sales
    • New Businesses
    • Creating a sales plan
  • Selling and Advertising
    • Advertising
    • Direct Marketing
    • Trade Shows and Exhibitions
  • Selling to the Public Sector
  • Looking after your Customer
    • Use customer care to increase sales
    • How to deal with customer complaints
  • Marketing Articles
    • Does your sales approach close more doors than it opens?
    • How do I determine my marketing budget?
    • Making an exhibition of yourself
    • Marketing in the credit crunch
    • Why might your competitors be doing better than you?
• Financial Planning
• Complying with the law
• Employing for the first time
• Business Rates
• Support Schemes
• Young Traders
• Top Tips

New Businesses

New businesses have to make assumptions based on market research and realistic judgement.

Do you have customers waiting to buy from you? How many? Have you asked potential customers if they will buy from you? How much will they pay? If you have no idea where your customers will come from then you need to go back to your marketing strategy and identifying your market and potential customers.

If you have done market research then you could begin a sales forecast by listing the number of customers you think is realistic to achieve in your first year. List them as 'New customer 1', 'New customer 2' etc. Then try to assign a realistic sales figure against each of them.  There must inevitably be some guesswork here, but at least you should reach a forecast that is broadly in the right area.

Being over optimistic with your sales forecasting will not help your business. New businesses should avoid the mistake of working out the level of sales they need for the business to be viable, then putting this figure in as the forecast.