Turn sales projection into a game every sales team will love.
William Shakespeare said, “If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.” While big data has grown since Shakespeare spoke these wise words, sales projection is still mostly hypothetical. In fact, it’s more about setting goals and milestones.
But sales projection is how a company maps out their future, and employees can be trained by the higher-ups on how to accomplish the sales goals set out for these projections. But how can you make the training process fun while still making clear that they are responsible for hitting these goals and milestones?
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A general overview of sales projection
Sales projection is essentially the act of forecasting the future revenue a company could earn over a certain period of time. The time frame could be anything from one month to six months to five years or longer.
There’s a lot that goes into sales projection. Sales managers figure out the price of producing products or services, determine the amount of sales your business will need to break even, and also calculate sales your company will make in advertising. They also take the current economic condition into consideration and consider any seasonal sales or competition before projecting what they expect to make in profits over a specific period.
As tedious as this process may be, there are perks and advantages that come along with projecting your company’s sales. Predicting your future in sales helps your company recognize a potential for growth and also prepare for what the future may bring. Another huge perk to forecasting future sales is being able to obtain loans or investors for your company.
Five ways to train your staff on sales projection
Sales projection is unique in that it involves a lot of calculating and crunching numbers. Unlike other forms of training, employees don’t necessarily need to study—they need to practice.
Let’s say you are training a group of employees on sales projection at the same time. Challenge them to compete against each other.
- Put everyone into teams and have the teams compete to create a short-term sales projection (one week) and then come back together to see how hitting the projection, or not hitting it, affects longer term goals.
- Initiate a workshop where everyone calculates personal sales projections, for a longer period of time (one month) and comes up with a list of what they need to do to hit those predictions.
- Create a pretend budget for marketing a particular product or service, and add other factors into the equation, such as economic condition, competition, seasonal sales, marketing, and more.
- Have each person predict sales of another sales employee. While this will train them to become experts in the art of sales projection, it will also motivate them to compete in getting more sales in for the month.
- Study past sales projections as a way to familiarize them with the pattern of sales. Be sure to match up projections with actual sales results so they can see if previous projections were realistic or not.
Once your sales staff has mastered these steps in the training, they can begin projecting sales on their own – real sales this time.
If you want to give the competition more heat, you can raise the stakes and offer an incentive to whoever is most accurate in their projections.
While your staff are busy competing against each other to learn how to project sales – and then hopefully competing against each other to close deals – Blitz can help you hit those projections by managing your referrals, prospects and customers. We can assign leads to your sales staff as they come in and send the follow-up thank you notes to customers who recently extended a contract.
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Let us help you simplify your sales process. Sign up for a 30-day FREE trial of our lead management software and turn more leads into customers with less work!
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