How to project your annual income from service and product sales

Are you working on your business plan and trying to project your sales and potential income? Let me share the way we do this.

For the most part, we create our business plan one year at a time. We start out with an idea of what programs we’re going to create, workshops we’re going to offer, or new direction we’re going to take to grow the business and get clients.

The next step is to map out our revenue plan, which includes:

- Deciding on program timing and putting the events on a calendar.
- Estimating the number of people who will take advantage of each offering.
- Determining the price point we can charge for each program.

For passive income or information products, we base the estimates on our recent experience. There are two key factors:

1. How much we sell next year is directly related to what we sold last year.
2. How much we expect our list to grow also impacts the number of products we can well.

For example, years ago I had a list of 2,000 people which usually grew by 10 people each week. (That’s how many free CDs we usually sent out per week.) In addition, I knew I usually sold about one system product per week. From these numbers, we forecasted what we could sell in a year. So, if the list doubled to 4,000 people, we would probably be sending out 20 CDs per week, then we would likely double the number of systems products sold per week to two.

Over the years, this type of rudimentary math has held true for us and has been a good way to project sales and income. Even today, the number of people that order the free CD directly correlates to the number of people who purchase system product.

To forecast your sales and income, you can follow this same method. Think about how many products and services you have and the income that comes from them now in relationship to the size of your list. You might also base your income on the number of:

- Current clients you have.
- Speaking gigs you do to get clients.
- Get acquainted calls you have.

Even though this process is rather basic, it works and is a lot more practical that just picking a number since it’s based on actual business experience.

Your Assignment:
Projecting annual sales will give you the ability to see where you need to focus your time. What would help grow your business? Do you need to create products, do more speaking, or offer more workshops to get clients and generate income? What has worked for your business in the past and what do you want to focus on for the following year to get clients? When you plan ahead, it makes the workflow more realistic and balanced.