Summary
This downloadable PDF lesson plan for English teachers helps B2 students master sales forecasting. An ideal ESL class material for business English. This business English lesson helps students discuss sales pipelines and forecasts.
Activities include a vocabulary matching exercise, a listening gap-fill about a manager's update, and a reading comprehension task about a fictional company's missed targets.
Students practice key phrases for sales meetings and learn grammar for hedging and speculation before applying everything in a final role-play where they must agree on a quarterly forecast. It's a comprehensive B2-level resource.
Activities
- Students begin by discussing a sales funnel diagram before matching key business terms like 'sales pipeline,' 'forecasting,' and 'conversion rate' with their definitions to build a solid foundation for the lesson's topic.
- A listening exercise challenges students to fill in the gaps in a sales manager's update. This is followed by a short reading about a company that missed its targets due to an overly optimistic forecast, testing comprehension.
- After studying useful phrases and grammar for hedging (e.g., 'might,' 'it seems likely that'), students engage in a final role-play. They take on roles like manager, sales rep, and analyst to negotiate a realistic quarterly sales forecast.
Vocabulary focus
The lesson focuses on essential business vocabulary for discussing sales performance. Key terms include 'sales pipeline,' 'forecasting,' 'conversion rate,' 'bottleneck,' 'projections,' 'conservative,' and 'robust.' Students also learn useful phrases for assessing performance, expressing optimism or caution, and making suggestions in a sales meeting context.
Grammar focus
The grammar section concentrates on hedging and speculation, which is crucial for professional forecasting. Students learn to avoid making definite statements by using modal verbs (might, could, may), adverbs (likely, probably), and specific phrases (it seems likely that, the projections suggest).
