Well, welcome to the fourth course in the sales operations specialization, and in this course, we will cover the broad topic of sales administration. This includes sales forecasting, budgeting, territories, evaluation, and ethics. We will first define a sales forecast and shows some approaches to calculating a forecast. Unlike other planning processes that are based on stable factors, sales planning is subject to continual change. In today's global markets driven by volatile demand and serviced by increasingly distended and complex networks, that change is accelerating. Getting a handle on it is a very tough nut to crack. How much can we sell? How big should our market be next year? These are the questions that confront a sales manager, and they're critical questions because their answers drive revenue and help determine the number of people that you need to employ and pay, and how much material or goods you will need to purchase in the time ahead. Indeed, the volume of business drives nearly everything in an enterprise and that volume is defined by sale related to a forecast as a sales budget, and we will show you what is a sales budget and how a sales manager calculates a sales budget. Designing an effective sales budget requires very careful analysis of target markets, competitors capabilities, prevailing economic trends, and past sales figures just to name a few variables that could affect potential profits. Your sales budget governs your sales department, helping the employees perform their roles in line with the larger organizational strategy. Another managerial decision in sales management is designing sales territories. Sales territory management is more important than many may realize. It can boost your sales team's morale, increased sales, provide a larger customer base, and inspire team cohesion. The lack of sales territories or poorly designed territories results in the opposite, and as a real managerial headache. We're going to show you two approaches to developing a sales territory and both are equally popular. If you have taken the other courses in this specialization, you have learned just about every facet of sales management from hiring and organize the sales force to motivating and managing sales operations. But at some point, a sales manager must step back and examine the overall performance of the enterprise, and that is the next topic in this course, and here you will learn the components of sales performance evaluation. Finally, we will describe the legal and ethical issues facing sales managers. Effective selling requires more than an ability to communicate a product's features or benefits. Sales representatives must also develop quality relationships with their customers. Regardless of a company's reputation, customers choose to do business with people they trust. Sales representatives have to earn that trust by behaving ethically, and conveying a commitment to customer needs.