photo credit: borispumps
A few month’s ago Seth Godin wrote a post called Are you a scientist? In the post he talks about how making predictions or forecasting the future is far more valuable than explaining the past. Doing so, whether publicly or privately, can sharpen your thinking and analysis about what is happening around you, what could happen in the future and help better prepare you and your business for the future.
Think about it.
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We forecast the weather
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We forecast sales numbers, turnover and profitability
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We forecast our resource needs, our capital spending, our people needs, our office needs, the number of desks, our IT needs etc etc
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Why? I think it’s all about preparedness.
Why, therefore, don’t we do more customer forecasting
I don’t mean sales numbers or how many units they will buy from us or how often. That’s about us.
What I mean is ….why don’t we spend more time forecasting, or at least thinking about, how our customers and their needs will change in the future?
What does that say about their importance? Is it dangerous to assume that they will stay static when we forecast many other things?
