Sales forecasting is always a tough requirement. After all, you’re forecasting the future, and, almost by definition, it’s going to be wrong. It’s merely a question of the degree of wrongness, which becomes the much vaulted new metric of “forecast accuracy”. When you’re in sales, it’s part of the badge, and anyone who complains that “it’s tough to forecast the future” should start looking for a job on the shipping dock.
Sure, forecasting sales is tough for everyone-for the salespeople on the front lines, their supervisors and managers in the management ranks and, of course, for the CEO who ultimately needs to project earnings for the board members and shareholders.
I thought about all of this when I listened to Ben Bernanke yesterday at his first press conference. Talk about tough jobs. Anything and everything could have gone wrong, and yet as a forecaster, he was open, transparent and factual. No stories, no emotions, just activities and facts.
Bernanke's superb performance yesterday...and the stock market's reaction to it-was something for all of us to remember the next time we’re called on to provide forecasts to our bosses or to the public.