Thoughtful Thursdays - Increasing Sales Part 1

An integral part of growing any business is knowing identifying where you want sales to come from. Over a period of time your customer's purchase history helps you develop a sales forecast. When you take your sales forecast and drill down into the details, your sales plan begins to take shape. Taking the time to crunch the numbers and set goals can help you maintain focus on the job at hand and lead to the faster achievement of those goals.

During the next few weeks we will investigate ways to help you develop a detailed plan for sales growth.

Having a percent growth target over the previous year is a very good place to start. From that point I have traditionally worked backwards to determine where the growth will come from.

For this week take your sales for the past year and come up with a dollar value for incremental growth for the next twelve months.

Next week we will look at ways to drill into your projected growth.

Looking ahead to next week, sales growth comes from three areas, this assumes that your sales will remain flat if you do nothing different year to year.

1. Sell more to existing customers.
2. Sell to new customers.
3. Raise your prices at existing customers.

Good selling,

Richard