Marketing Strategy for Small- to Medium-Sized Manufacturers

Building a Market-Based, Realistic Sales Forecast from C-P-M™, Marketing Research, Sales Coverage, and the Territory Plan

Previous material shows that SMMs’ sales forecasting and sales reporting are not routinely prepared and that most of the 75 out of 126 firms who do prepare a sales forecast do so only at the company level and only 24 do so to sales person level: This could contribute to the companies’ general unhappiness with sales performance. It’s difficult to get the sales force to produce as expected without a forecast to communicate expectations and just as difficult to evaluate its performance without a sales report.

Another aspect of sales forecasting that could reduce its usefulness is the amount of detail and the sources used for ...