Sales and Market Forecasting for Entrepreneurs

Chapter 5

Forest From the Trees

For forest-from-the-trees or bottom-up forecasting, you break your problem down into smaller pieces, work on the pieces, and then add them up again to get the whole picture. This is particularly useful for forecasting sales. It is often easier to forecast each detail separately and then to add up the details to produce a complete forecast.

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We’re just human, so we can’t see the future as accurately as we’d like. It helps, though, to break the problem into smaller parts. Look at the parts in detail, then add them back up. I think this is often the better way to do it because we can ...