Do you know how much work you are likely to have next month?

Can you plan your forward sales? Many companies claim that it is impossible as buyers place jobs so near to delivery times. It feels like a lottery as to whether your job sheet will be full or empty in a few days’ time.

On the other hand, there are a good number of companies that know exactly when they are busy and when they are quiet. They sell their quiet spaces in advance. They also have a pretty good idea about their loadings for the coming weeks. Many of them achieve this level of planning because they use a sales pipeline report.

Sales pipeline reports

A sales pipeline report details all the larger jobs that you are currently bidding for. It shows the state of play for all the jobs. Are they a vague idea in the client’s mind? Have you quoted for it? Is there a schedule? It gives you an excellent idea of what might be coming.


However, the key word here in the previous sentence is ‘might’. You have no guarantee that you will win any particular one of these jobs. However, you also know that you are going to win some of these jobs.

By taking a percentage of all the jobs at each stage, you gain a pretty good idea of what is likely to happen over the next few weeks. Let’s say you win, on average, one in ten jobs that you quote. You take the total value of all the jobs that are at the quoting stage and have not progressed further. You know that you will win around 10 percent of this work. This gives you a pretty good idea of how much work you are likely to win from projects at this stage.

You then repeat this process for all larger projects at different stages. Suddenly, you have a good idea of what your capacity loadings for new work are likely to be. Next combine this with your estimate for regular small jobs that come in without much sales effort. To estimate this element, I recommend taking the figure of work from the same period in the previous year and reducing it by 15 percent.

Now you have a good idea if you have to focus on selling a lot of available space. Or if you have the better problem of how to find capacity for all these jobs.

The sales pipeline report has another excellent use. It gives you a very good overview of how individual sales people are performing. What activity are they undertaking? What success rates are they achieving? It is a very useful report to use in a monthly sales meeting or in a performance review meeting.

This report gives you a much better idea of what is going to happen at your company. It also gives you a better idea of what your sales people are up to.

Is it time you did a little more sales planning?


PS If you’d like practical ideas on how to engage with today’s buyers, download Matthew’s free e-book “Ten Common Print Selling Errors and What To Do About Them” right now at http://profitableprintrelationships.com/e-book/ You’ll also receive his regular “Views from the print buyer” bulletin, full of ideas on how to sell print effectively.




Your text here...