Improving sales forecasting accuracy

SALES forecasting has been a major problem for many organizations engaged in the sale of goods and services for a long time. With the onset of the pandemic in 2020 and now the gloom of oil price hikes and inflation, making close-to-accurate sales forecasts has become almost impossible.

One of the forecasting challenges faced by sales managers is seller subjectivity. As proven in psychology, sellers tend to be overly optimistic of their forecasts, only to under-deliver at the end. This is why more than 40 percent of sales operations leaders identified this as their biggest challenge to forecast accuracy, according to a study by Korn Ferry.