Analytical Software for Pricing, Product Marketing and Sales Operations

Solutions > Product Marketing > Forecasting

From black art to science

Product forecasting has been compared to driving by looking in the rear view mirror. You need to look ahead – but you need more than historical data and intuition to do it well. Nor is it good enough to do forecasting quarterly, or even monthly. Things change faster than that. Your company’s reaction time means the difference between a profitable year, and a year in which you write down millions of dollars in excess inventory.

Vistaar allows you to leverage your knowledge of market conditions, customer behavior, and product attributes to generate more accurate forecasts. Even more important: It lets you easily adjust and manage these forecasts as new information emerges or business conditions change.

All other groups in your company will understand your forecast changes, see how they impact their own forecasts, and be able to adjust their plans accordingly. Alignment of forecasts among key functional areas – what a concept. And it’s within reach.

See it in action

This sophisticated forecasting solution is also easy to use. To see how you can:

Choose from multiple approaches such as causal, time series, and compiled forecasting.
Forecast at SKU, product, family, or portfolio levels.
Identify and use the most-effective techniques and measures (revenue, units, costs, etc.) when forecasting for a particular dimension such as product, customer, or geography.
Scenario plan impact of forecast changes on other marketing, sales, and operations plans.

Why Vistaar for product forecasting?

More than 70% of product marketing executives surveyed use Excel spreadsheets for competitive intelligence, market analytics, short-term product forecasting, product portfolio analysis, and communication with other groups. Nearly 68% are less than satisfied with the applications they use for these complex and varied processes. — CMO Council / BPM Forum study

Product forecasts drive so much of the business, from production planning and inventory to financial forecasts and business planning. With so much riding on product forecasts, they need to be as accurate as possible. How can you improve accuracy of what is, in essence, a guess about the future?

The first step is to go beyond historical data analysis based on a jumble of disconnected spreadsheets and old data sources. You can start by incorporating continuous information about current market conditions, customer behaviors, and product attributes. Vistaar’s data repository allows you to do just that.

Then we give you sophisticated analyses to analyze this up-to-date information, create forecasts based on various scenarios, and allow everyone involved to see the impact of the forecast on their own plans and goals.

Email or call us at (973) 434-6196 for more information or to schedule a product demo.