Sales Forecasting

Key Challenges & How to Solve Them

Sales Forecasting is Fraught with Error

Accurate forecasting of sales revenues is absolutely critical for businesses and their ability to adapt. However, there are significant challenges in how you do it:

  1. Distorting biases: Conflicting interests, hopes and perspectives taint our expectations. Sales people lowball their forecasts for higher commissions, new product developers overestimate the demand for their ideas to secure approval, customers overpromise on future purchases to get a lower price.

  2. Things change: The future is always uncertain, for many reasons. Competitor actions, geopolitical events, technology breakthroughs, regulatory changes, or sourcing issues can all result in expensive forecasting errors.

  3. Blackbox problem: With statistical forecasting methods, such as correlation analysis, trend analysis, or dynamic modelling, deviations are hard to interpret and forecasts are highly dependent on the algorithms applied.

  4. Data issues: Data analytics depends on the availability of historical data and its quality. In the event of significant market events, humans will understand the meaning of input data more profoundly than statistical algorithms.

The Prediki Solution

Tap collective intelligence for better forecasting

With Prediki's virtual stock market mechanism and its integrated market talk feature, you can harness the proverbial Wisdom of Crowds to produce significantly more accurate and reliable revenue forecasts. The necessary knowledge already resides with buyers or employees, or both of them jointly. We can help recruiting them.

Prediki partners with market research agencies world-wide. Our analysts can assist you in interpreting this quantitative and qualitative market data.

WANT TO IMPROVE SALES FORECASTING? COMBINE HUMAN INSIGHT WITH STATISTICAL FORECASTING.

It is hard to beat a market for accuracy. Prediki's base case forecasts are supplemented by high and low case scenarios to facilitate better risk assessment and management.

Semantic and sentiment analysis functions identify the reasons for forecast changes from conversations in the market talk. No more blackbox forecasts.

Compared to the arduous and detail-oriented process of traditional bottom-up forecasting, participants’ effort is minimal: trading is simple and fast, debating is as easy as posting on a social network.

A simple monthly prompt to participants before a planning meeting triggers updated forecasts. However, trading is always-on, 24x7, so you get an early warning if things change.

Further Possibilities

Besides giving you more accurate sales forecasts, Prediki offers you additional benefits not afforded by statistical methods:

  1. What if: With Prediki, you can also produce conditional sales forecasts for possible strategies: general price increases, changes in positioning, large-scale campaigns, or key product launches.

  2. Collaboration: As a key side effect, crowd forecasting improves internal communication, cooperation, and spontaneous self-organisation.

  3. Price forecasts: In the same way, your crowd can also forecast likely changes in the market price of commodities.

Applications: Sales and demand forecasting, market price predictions, revenue and turnover projections.