Download free excel template to forecast sales for a specific period of time. This template is useful for sales managers, operations managers, business leaders and consultants. Students can also use this template for their sales and marketing research or case study purpose.
Introduction to sales forecasting
A sales forecast is an expression of expected sales revenue. A sales forecast estimates how much your company plans to sell within a certain time period (like quarter or year). The best sales forecasts do this with a high degree of accuracy. (Source : Salesforce)
Sales forecasting allows companies to generate the data needed to prepare future plans and strategies. One of the advantages of sales forecasting is that it allows your company to forecast future revenues over specific periods of time in order to better allocate resources.
Types of sales forecasting
If we talk about the types of sales forecasting that can be applied in the projection and forecasting, there are three basic types, namely;
- Qualitative techniques,
- Time series analysis and projection, and
- Causal models.
The first uses qualitative data (expert opinion, for example) and information about special events of the kind already mentioned, and may or may not take the past into consideration.
The second, on the other hand, focuses entirely on patterns and pattern changes, and thus relies entirely on historical data.
The third uses highly refined and specific information about relationships between system elements, and is powerful enough to take special events formally into account. As with time series analysis and projection techniques, the past is important to causal models.
If you want to understand the types of sales forecasting, you can study the brief study on sales forecastingby Harvard Business Review.
About this sales forecasting excel template
Once you download this template, it comes with three worksheets, namely,
- Lead sheet – This sheet consists of fields wherein you capture the details of leads or potential leads and try to work out the tentative sales value along with their probability. Here the probability percentage can be subjective. However, appropriate rationale shall be applied while pointing out the probability of success ratio. Furthermore, this sheet also provides and works as a tracker for all the leads generated and their type.
- Sales Forecasting – This sheet is the month wise bifurcation of the lead sheet. You can find details of lead wise monthly projected revenue/ business.
- Monthly Weighted average chart – This is the graphical representation of the sales forecasting sheet. This helps and works as a management reporting part of the overall exercise. Management usually prefer presentations in visualized form. Hence, this table helps you in quickly taking the chart to showcase the overall sales projection and forecasting.
Download and use Sales Forecasting Free Excel Template
To use this free excel template, you should have Microsoft Office/ Microsoft Excel installed in your system. After installing Excel or Spreadsheet, download the zip file of this template.
Extract the template using WinRAR or 7Zip decompressing software. Once extracted, you can open the file using Excel and start entering data or customizing the template.
