Sales Forecasting - New Business

These steps for developing a sales forecast can be applied to most kinds of new businesses:

Make some basic assumptions about the customers in your target market. Experienced business people will tell you that a good rule of thumb is that 20% of your customers account for 80% of your sales. If you can identify this 20% you can begin to develop a profile of your principal markets.

Sample customer profiles:

1. Male, ages 20-34, professional, middle income, fitness conscious.

2. Young families, parents 25 to 39, middle income, home owners

3. Small to medium sized magazine and book publishers with sales from $500,000 to $2,000,000

Determine trends by talking to trade suppliers about what is selling well and what is not. Check out recent copies of your industry’s trade magazines. Search the Business Periodicals Index (found in larger libraries) for articles related to your type of business.

Step 2: Establish the approximate size and location of your planned trading area.

Use available statistics to determine the general characteristics of this area. Use local sources to determine unique characteristics about your trading area. How far will your average customer travel to buy from your shop? Where do you intend to distribute or promote your product? This is your trading area.

Estimating the number of individuals or households can be done with little difficulty using Statistics Canada census data. Statistics Canada’s Family Expenditure Survey can identify what the average household spends on goods and services. Information on planned construction is available from a variety of sources. Directories such as the Yellow Pages can help identify names of companies located in your trading area. Neighbourhood business owners, the local Chamber of Commerce, the Government Agent and the community newspaper are some sources that can give you insight into unique characteristics of your area.

Get out on the street and study your competitors. Visit their stores or the locations where their product is offered. Analyze the location, customer volumes, traffic patterns, hours of operation, busy periods, prices, quality of their goods and services, product lines carried, promotional techniques, positioning, product catalogues and other handouts. If feasible, talk to customers and sales staff.

The basis for your sales forecast can be the average monthly sales of a similar-sized competitor’s operations who is operating in a similar market. It is recommended that you make adjustments for this year¹s predicted trend for the industry. Be sure to reduce your figures by a start-up year factor of about 50% a month for the start-up months.

Consider how well your competition satisfies the needs of potential customers in your trading area. Determine how you fit in to this picture and what niche you plan to fill. Will you offer a better location, convenience, a better price, later hours, better quality, better service?

Consider population and economic growth in your trading area. Using your research, make an educated guess at your market share. If possible, express this as the number of customers you can hope to attract. You may want to keep it conservative and reduce your figure by approximately 15%.

Prepare sales estimates month by month. Be sure to assess how seasonal your business is and consider your start up months.

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