Excel Sales Forecasting For Dummies

Excel Sales Forecasting For Dummies
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Excel at predicting sales and forecasting trends using Microsoft Excel!

If you're a sales or marketing professional, you know that forecasting sales is one of the biggest challenges you face on the job. Unlike other books on the subject, Excel Sales Forecasting For Dummies, 2nd Edition leaves arcane business school terms and complex algebraic equations at the door, focusing instead on what you can do right now to utilize the world's most popular spreadsheet program to produce forecasts you can rely on.

Loaded with confidence boosters for anyone who succumbs to sweaty palms when sales predictions are mentioned, this trusted guide show you how to use the many tools Excel provides to arrange your past data, set up lists and pivot tables, use moving averages, and so much more. Before you know it, you'll become a forecaster par excellence—even if numbers aren't your jam.

Choose the right forecasting method

Find relationships in your data

Predict seasonal sales

Filter lists or turn them into charts

Consider this guide your crystal ball—and start predicting the future with confidence and ease!

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Excel Sales Forecasting For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016942855

ISBN: 978-1-119-29142-8

ISBN 978-1-119-29143-5 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-119-29144-2 (ePDF)

Introduction

You wouldn’t have pulled this book off the shelf if you didn’t need to forecast sales. And I’m sure that you’re not Nostradamus. Your office isn’t filled with the smell of incense and it’s not your job to predict the date that the world will come to an end.

But someone – perhaps you – wants you to forecast sales, and you find out how to do that here, using the best general-purpose analysis program around, Microsoft Excel.

About This Book

This book concentrates on using numbers to forecast sales. If you’re a salesperson, or a sales manager, or someone yet higher up the org chart, you’ve run into forecasts that are based not on numbers but on guesses, sales quotas, wishful thinking, and Scotch.

I get away from that kind of thing here. I use numbers instead. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a math major to use Excel for your forecasting. Excel has a passel of tools that will do it on your behalf. Some of them are even easy to use, as you’ll see.

That said, it’s not all about numbers. You still need to understand your products, your company, and your market before you can make a sensible sales forecast, and I have to trust you on that. I hope I can. I think I can. Otherwise, start with Part 1, which talks about the context for a forecast.

You can hop around the chapters in this book, as you can in all books that feature the guy with a pool ball rack for a head. There are three basic approaches to forecasting with numbers – moving averages, smoothing, and regression – and you really don’t have to know much about one to understand another. It helps to know all three, but you don’t really need to.



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