How to prepare a sales projection of a company?

Sales forecasts have a very specific purpose, that of establishing exact costs, expenses and other chapters. In this way, identifying old sales results and looking at trends for the business areas to be developed We can obtain an accurate estimate that tells us what needs (and potentialities) the company will have in that period of weather.

Now we know what a sales projection means, we understand its usefulness in a basic way and in the same way we can intuit its great importance in the commercial traffic, but nevertheless, we would like to focus this article on how to carry out the company's sales projection in a simple and fast.

Well, first of all, it should be noted that the first point to create a sales projection is to always have the results historical data of all the products that the company sells, and thus, have a financial analysis of the company's income during a series of exercises, preferably more than five, in order to reliably observe which is the usual development of the company.

It is not enough to know the global accounts, but seasonality, or all those factors, must also be taken into account. factors that alter the normal performance of the company such as extraordinary campaigns or unforeseen sales and very punctual. All this in order to know if there are dependency relationships with a specific buyer and assess the need or not for diversification.

It is also necessary to determine which are the demand estimates, both short and long term, foresee what it is and above all what the economic environment will be, know the growth rate economic, the inflation and the cost of money among many other macro-economic factors that could influence this valuation.

Once we handle all this information we can begin to elaborate the projection. In this sense, we will assess the conditions of previous years and prepare an average. To this average we will add the trends that we have identified both for specific products and in terms of macro-economic figures. Finally, and always taking into account specific circumstances (to remove them from the forecast) we can capture all these circumstances and weigh them with the previous points.

What is usually done next is to create two projections, one annual, and several monthly, taking into account the specific circumstances of each month or season.