As a business owner, sales VP or entrepreneur, I’m sure your mind is always busy wondering how you could take your business to the next level. How can you grow? How can you grow faster? How can you be more profitable? In which direction should you go?

Maybe from the start of your journey in the company, you consider that you’ve already grown a great deal and had success, but you still want to defy the status quo and go even further.

It is completely normal, and in fact, beneficial to your company to question what is slowing down or even stalling your growth and what you can do to move forward. But to pinpoint the exact reasons can be a challenging task, especially when it involves people. Does your sales team allow you to achieve your goals?

I see many sales leaders struggling to establish reliable sales forecasts for the coming year. This is a very difficult exercise that leaves all managers and sales leaders with headaches.

However, you can improve the quality of your forecasts and avoid some very common mistakes.

1. Consider unusual gains as reproducible

Sales transformation is more than a trend or a buzzword, it is an inevitable shift dictated by the conditions of the economy, changes in behaviors, and expectations. Sales have changed much more in the last 5 years than in the previous 25 years!

Among the conditions that require companies to transform themselves is the predominance of the web and the access to information everywhere and at all times.

Today, sales reps no longer hold the information that decision-makers are looking for and that is why we are contacting them much later in the buying process. Comparing different suppliers has become child's play and competition is now worldwide for many products and services.

In general, companies are often looking for growth flows. Indeed, most are looking to grow faster by generating more revenue and profit.

The problem I often encounter when I work with business leaders is that they feel blocked and limited in their growth. They claim that the market is saturated and that they no longer know where to seek growth. However, when I ask them what their market shares are, many of them have no idea. That's why I recommend conducting a market study to better understand your situation and identify growth opportunities. But this study will only tell you where you can look for growth. However, there is no guarantee that your sales force will know what to do and how to bring you the sales opportunities identified in the study.

So, what can you do about it?

Business leaders and owners constantly have to make decisions in their lives and for their company. Decisions made on the business side can have impacts on the private life and vice-versa.

As human beings, we put in place our own tactics to help us in our decision-making and we build our own process to improve our ability to make better decisions. At the level of business leaders, the consequences of poor decisions or lack of decisions can go very far.

Moreover, when business problems become significant enough, it is usually because they have not been solved when they were still controllable. This is often the consequence of several missed opportunities to make "small" decisions.