Science of Sales & Marketing

Forecasting is already discussed in old management books several times as it’s all about predicting, projecting & estimating some specific future events & market conditions and other variable (internal or external) condition in the organization.

For online business forecasting is becoming an important element of planning to meet the business objective in shorter time. I think forecasting in online business must be blend with intellectual basis & information inputs for undertaking the formulation of meaningful plans. Intelligent, systematic & scientific forecasting should be an attempt for understanding the state of the uncertainty and complexity of some of the variables of the future, for example the changing behavior of search engine algorithms. The future search engine seems to be more intelligent & powerful, it would be more scientific and systematic by detecting knowledge. I guess the future search engine is going to establish dialogue with the users to provide the “Exact & Accurate ” information as per their search terms within a single page search results.

So as a human our intelligent forecasting should strengthens the sense of confidence and level of individual competence and make informed. The assumption should be estimated with the judgment of the implications of future events and behavior of variables. They might be related to the future market condition, general price situation, cross culture, political condition and change in its structure, business condition and the competitive trends, in short the prediction should be based with any degree of these credibility.

Major initiative on new market, new products, and new technology and processes may end up as failures if you do not exercise in forecasting and operate a flexible plans. The very philosophy of planning is a philosophy of faith in the future even though the future is uncertain and complex. You need flexible plans, as flexible plans remain largely relevant even in the face of unexpected future changes within certain limits. You need to generate more reliable, relevant and adequate information through improved scanning and forecasting techniques.

For large organization installation of dynamic management intelligence systems is one of the steps that can lead them in the right direction. Forecasting lead you to formulate a flexible plans which can be modified at short-notice in response to emerging contingencies and assumption for a range of possible situations.

If you are planning for outsourcing, I would suggest to put a selective approach of outsourcing rather than exclusively relying on a single provider, a selective approach of outsourcing will enable you to test the capability and reliability of the outsourcing company that you choose. If you outsource two selective areas to two different providers you can easily differentiate the overall cost and their level of competence and their skills, by analyzing these you can be in easy position to further proceed and so on release your further load for assigning them different outsourcing tasks.

The companies are getting leverage and becoming smarter by adopting these changing trends. You can save cost & time through segmentation & priorities your specific need per merit and so on you can be able to minimize any perceived risk. Make sure to check particular outsourcing companies should have its own IT governance & best IT portfolio with “specialization” of different segment of outsourcing needs that best match with your outsourcing need keeping your customers in center point.

To achieve breakthrough results by bringing radical changes in business process you need to extend far beyond the scope of information technology & software engineering through BPR. The main principle start from organizing around outcome, not task hence it should address leveraging IT as a competitive tool by placing the customer at the center point sponsored by top executives complying with given time frame. Do not involve outsider since BPR should be your own integral part as the incorporate information processing work into the real work through it raw information and hence the decision point should be controllable. Interestingly BPR models involve the analysis and redesign of process, policies, organizational structures and belief & behaviors but it does not ignore corporate culture.