Forecasting Resistance? Turn Skeptics into Believers: Lessons I’ve Learned in Teaching Others to Forecast

As a marketing leader, helping team members get comfortable with forecasting is crucial to your success and growth. Even a ‘pretty good’ forecast allows marketing leaders to shift from an incremental growth mindset to a step-change strategy.

Four Most Common Points of Resistance

1. "What’s the point if I’m already driving growth?"

The first step is helping your team understand the value of a forecast.

1.  Adjust Budgets and Resources: It helps showcases the gap between targets and actual performance, revealing opportunities to double down on region, customer or product investment.

2. Drive Step-Change Growth: It provides the foundation to move beyond incremental improvements. When asked to create a forecast, most team members will apply modest (say 10%) growth on top of past performance. However, significant progress requires bigger investments, like adopting a new technology or investing in a new channel

3. Storytelling Tool: It links strategy to results, explaining decisions and aligning them with business objectives. It shows marketing as an experimental discipline involving risk. In a future post, I’ll discuss balancing market risk and effectively communicating this to the C-suite and board.

2. Which metrics should start with?"

Successful forecasting depends on selecting KPIs that align with business goals and ensure consistency. Consult with your channel leaders and align on basic metrics like MQLs, SQLs, traffic, and conversion rates, which are lagging indicators. 

As forecasting improves, add leading indicators like website traffic and engagement metrics.

3. "The data isn't good enough!"

Real-world data is always imperfect. While there can come a point where the data simply can’t be trusted, more often than not, it’s good enough as a starting point. Document assumptions and identify risks to improve forecast credibility and insights. (Note: Improving data quality and dependency is a crucial task that is often undervalued in organizations.)

4. "What if I get it wrong?"

Forecasting Is Not a Test—It’s an Iterative Organizational Process

Iterative: Your first forecasts will be wrong, and that is okay. Drawing a line in the sand helps your team commit to a viewpoint, which they can refine.

Organizational: Forecasts rely on the greater organization to supply the right data, reports, etc. Each forecast review assesses if the right KPIs and data are being used or can be improved.

Process: Collaborative forecast reviews with partners help other teams to plan, build alignment, and drive growth.

A forecast doesn’t need to be perfect to be valuable. By helping your team understand its role in strategic decision-making, you can turn skeptics into advocates for step-change growth.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you'd like to discuss this topic, or would like help with other data-driven marketing topics.