Improving Sales Forecasting Management in Professional Services Business

Abstract

This research was established to increase the awareness what are the things affecting to the whole sales forecasting and how to improve the current practices in the case company. The research was conducted by using existing literature as a theory base and then evaluating the target organization in order to identify the ways how to improve the current practices. The theory section concentrated on the characteristics of professional services and introducing a comprehensive sales forecasting management framework. Then the synthesis of these two fields was used in the empirical part of the research which concentrated on evaluating the current state of sales forecasting management in the target organization.

As a result, this research offers a lot of information what are the things that have an impact on the results of sales forecasting practices in the target organization. The results clearly showed that there are many areas in the sales forecasting management that can be improved in order to reach better performance. The final results included improvement recommendations regarding all the four main components in the used sales forecasting management framework. The total amount of recommendations was 13 with the emphasis on the sales forecasting capability component in the framework which includes information logistics and shared interpretation regarding the sales forecasting activities.