Do you believe your marketing forecast?

The National Advertisers Association in the US released a study saying that

• 9 out of 10 CFOs don’t use ROI (return on investment) numbers or forecasts from their marketing department.
• 7 out of 10 CFOs don’t use marketing department’s input for financial guidance.
• 6 out of 10 CFOs believe that marketers don’t understand the financial implications.

If we can’t convince the person with the money in the organization, how are we to get any funding? While we may blame the Sales department for the inaccuracies , there are certain things we, as marketers, can do.

Here are some:

1. Get input from customers creatively, including past customers for developing the forecast.
2. Understand the changing market place.  Demonstrate the changing customer preferences in product and media consumption in your forecast.
   • I remember the saying:
     “There are three types of people. Those make things happen, those watch things happen and those wonder what happened.”
     If you want to make things happen you must keep a pulse the trends.
3. Involve your CFO in the forecast development. Even if their involvement is small, make sure it is important so that they see the valuable work you do.
4. Track your forecast and compare with actual ROI so that every one learns from the variance.

Tagged as: marketing forecast, marketing ROI

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