Forecasting – What’s In It For Me?
The forecasting dream job — ticket sales for Cats. Every month looks the same. How many tickets will you sell? All of them.
Some forecasts are easy. Yours isn’t, or you wouldn’t be reading this. So why do you do it? Well, for starters, you have to. Someone with power over your paycheck told you to. But what do you get out of it?
Most sales people would say “nothing.” The only benefit they see is an estimate of how much commission they will earn, or how much closer to meeting their sales goals they will get, or how desperate they feel as the forecast period closes. And, following the rule of “you get what you pay for,” most forecasts are slapdash things that serve some other goal than to provide the enterprise with the vital information that it needs to plan and allocate and prepare. If there was a simple and effective way to forecast accurately, everyone would be a lot happier, except maybe the Guinness salesperson. His forecasts would go down.
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