A business that only watches the sales forecast may still be looking in the right direction. But it may be looking too late.
Sales forecasts tend to get attention because they ask: what business do we think we are going to win? Marketing forecasts seem more detached from the end goal: what demand are we likely to create, and what will that demand probably turn into?
A sales forecast might show that we expect £250,000 of new business next quarter. A marketing forecast should help explain where the enquiries, leads, opportunities and sales conversations needed to support that number are likely to come from.
In larger businesses, the distinction is usually visible because sales and marketing are separate teams. In smaller B2B firms, it can disappear. In that case, “forecasting” often becomes sales forecasting by default. That leaves a gap. If we only forecast sales, we may not notice early enough that marketing is under-feeding the business.
A marketing forecast does not need to be complicated. In a small business, it can start as a simple working model. What happened over the past year or two? How many website visits, enquiries, marketing-qualified leads, sales conversations and customers did we generate? Then separate the main channels: search, paid search, email, referrals, events, etc. They may behave very differently.
Then we need to work out the conversion rates between stages. How many website visitors become enquiries? How many enquiries become useful sales conversations?
After this, we can add what we know is changing. Are we increasing Google Ads spend? Has a major competitor entered the market? Then we can turn it into a few scenarios, from cautious to ambitious, in order to compare the forecast with sales targets.
If the sales forecast assumes a certain level of new revenue, does the marketing forecast suggest enough demand to support it? Sales forecasting asks what we are likely to close; marketing forecasting asks whether we are creating enough of the right opportunities in the first place.