How does marketing mesh with sales forecasting?
Freight forecasting is more of a learned art than a definitive science, and determining how sales will go is difficult.
Blythe Brumleve says she found this out this year with her launch of Freight School Playbook, her tips for infallible marketing; she was not sure if her expectations were realistic.
Kevin Hill and Brumleve talk about how supporting forecasts with efforts in marketing is super important and your marketing only works if you’re constantly pushing repetition of your product.
Hill says that even when you’re posting on social media, you can’t predict the virality of your content so there has to be a balance between quality and quantity of posts.
“You should spend 20% of your time on content creation and 80% on distribution,” says Brumleve, pointing out that sometimes the things with the least amount of forethought gain the most attention.
This attention is important when developing products; both Hill and Brumleve believe that you should do the research to develop an audience before monetizing them with a product you launch.
Daniel Stanton, author of “Supply Chain for Dummies,” joins the show to add his two cents into the marketing discussion.
Stanton just published a second edition of his bestselling book to include technology advances and changes in trends in supply chain, and to educate on risk management.
He says when it comes to forecasting for shippers, they look at marrying their sales goals with their operating ability in order to optimize sales.
He says the number sellers and operators agree on has to be accurate because “if sales is too high, there’s not enough product and if operations is too high, there’s too much inventory.”
Stanton says using artificial intelligence has helped increase the usage and accuracy of quantitative forecasting, and human judgement is used for qualitative forecasting.
He thinks neither method is perfect, but a forecast is just a forecast and your forecasts should be a guideline, not a rule book.
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