Market and Sales Forecasting

This workshop is designed to help marketers who need to produce ‘good’ forecasts develop practical forecasting skills within the context of a professional forecasting framework.

It covers all key aspects from forecasting fundamentals, best and worst practice, through challenges and issues to appropriate tools and techniques, with considerable use of the latter throughout.

As your forecasting skills develop (organisation/ planning, execution and evaluation), you’ll feel more confident that you’ve done a professional job ie. collected the right data, processed and interpreted it in the right way, drawn the right conclusions and justified both the validity of your methodology and the likely outcome ie. forecast. Information is power!

A more professional approach to forecasting - incorporating better planning, the collection, analysis and interpretation of appropriate data and the utilisation of information technology - should lead to increased confidence in the forecasts created and ultimately the performance delivered.

It is specifically designed for quantitatively oriented marketers who are proficient with spreadsheets and already have a reasonable understanding of the scientific (mathematical/statistical) side of marketing, but want to develop their skills and boost their confidence – especially in the increasingly important quantitative aspects of forecasting.

• Forecasting fundamentals (what, why, who, when, where and how).
• Information gathering sources and techniques.
• The use of information technology in forecasting.
• Market (macro) and segment (micro) forecasting.
• Market size, growth, change and share estimation.
• ‘Break-down’, ‘build-up’ and ‘multi-factor index’ methodologies.
• Qualitative (subjective) forecasting – sales people, panels, expert opinion, lead user, the Delphi Method.
• Quantitative (objective) forecasting - time series, moving averages, exponential smoothing, correlation, regression.
• Forecasting new products/services.
• State of the art forecasting (through econometrics and market modelling).
• Implementation, evaluation and control – metrics, variance analyses, control charts.

A mixture of slides, demos and discussion, with lots of ‘hands-on’ exercises and mini workshops geared to putting theory into practice and using IT/software to help produce and appraise forecasts. Emphasis on application!