Sales and Distribution Management

Estimating the potential of a market is very important for a company planning to enter a new market. This is a process where an organization estimates the attractiveness of the market for selling its products or services. Before venturing into a market and investing huge sums of money, it is very important to asses it in order to avoid irrecoverable losses. Besides studying the broad market factors such as the size of the population, GDP and the spending capacity of the market, firms should also analyze market specific factors such as customers'tastes and preferences, the cultural factors prevailing, their willingness to buy the products and so on.

Data regarding customer and market specific factors can be obtained through primary and secondary sources. Estimating the future sales of the company in a given market is called sales forecasting. Over the years, the importance of sales forecasting has been on the rise across the world. Apart from the mathematical models developed earlier, many new software tools have emerged for forecasting sales in a better fashion. Forecasting can be classified into qualitative forecasting and quantitative forecasting.