Sales Forecast Template

sales forecast template for your business

The sales forecast template is one of the most useful entrepreneurial tools because many of your future decisions will be based exactly on sales forecasts.

One entrepreneurial task is managing current business operations and preparing for future business operations. These preparations include some predictions or forecasts of the future trends in which the business will operate.

What is a Sales Forecast?

The sales forecast is a simple prediction of your business’s future sales of products or services. The sales forecast is a starting point for all future financial projections. It is based mostly on sales performance from the past of your products or services and other factors that can influence sales, such as unemployment, inflation rate, market trends, interest rates, customers’ spending patterns, etc.

Why Forecast Sales?

Sometimes, a good prediction of the future is one of the most important things that differentiates a successful business from an average one. However, forecasting the future is not a simple process because it is something that still has not happened or something that should happen later.

Can you make sales forecasts that are as close as possible to reality?

Forecasting is a really complex process in every business. Why complex? Because forecasts are never true and almost always fail. Why?

Therefore, we must compare our predictions with the actual situation to be able to make corrections in other business elements based on the sales forecast. This is because most of our future decisions will be based on this forecast.

With a precise sales forecast for the next year, you as an entrepreneur, can:

  1. Recognize customer’s demands for specific products for next year;
  2. Make better allocation of financial and other resources;
  3. Use forecasting as a starting point for business planning;
  4. Use forecasting in marketing planning;
  5. Create a real next year budget;
  6. Plan future business investments;
  7. Use forecasting in cash flow calculation;
  8. Plan future employment;
  9. Plan your costs more effectively…

Updated Version of Sales Forecast Template

Now, I’ve updated the free sales forecast template that was designed and published here on Entrepreneurship in a Box.

The change was in the design and content of the template. That means there are two additional columns:

  • Actual number of customers (number of customers that you have in the year for which you made forecasting) and
  • Actual average sales per customer (average sales in dollars per one customer you have realized in the year you made forecasting).

Why do I add these two columns to the updated version of the sales forecast template?

The answer is simple: better management of the data in the form. Now, you can easily check why something goes wrong and where your biggest failures are coming from.

Related8 Ideas to Help You Create Your Own Sales Leads Databases

Is it your customers? Or the number of average sales? You can easily answer these questions with this updated version of the sales forecast template and make proper changes and improvements.

The changes and improvements you will make in your business will make your next forecast as close to reality as possible. However, it means that you can better manage your future business projects, activities, investments, etc.

Here, you can find a sales forecast template that you can use for this purpose. It is designed so that you can see specific product or service sales in the current year and use them to predict sales for next year.

You can download the sales forecast template at Sales Forecast Templates (Right Click and Save Target As).

I have more business templates that you can use for your business:

  1. SWOT Analysis template.
  2. Sales Funnel Planning Template.
  3. Marketing Calendar Template.
  4. Competitive Analysis Template.
  5. Leads Database Template.
  6. Business Ideas Book Template.