How accurate are your marketing forecasts and analyses?

As an marketing professional, you know how difficult it can be to forecast demand for a new product, market, or business. Companies and individuals depend on you to accurately assess how successful a potential project or product may be. But because any new endeavor involves uncertainty, any forecast you provide needs to be more than a single-point estimate.

Whether you're analyze promotional pricing impact, forecasting expected profit returns, modeling competitive pricing, optimizing a portfolio of marketing programs, or assessing the financial risks in new ventures and proposals, you need to account for the uncertainty in your models. When uncertainty or variability increases, the results can include missed deadlines, escalating costs, and disappearing profits.

An important part of your job is to identify the sources of variability, whether technical or financial, and to manage and reduce the variability as best you can. The good news is that, no matter what risks you face, Crystal Ball software can help you find the specific solution for your needs.

Crystal Ball is a Microsoft® Excel®-based suite of analytical tools that includes Monte Carlo simulation, optimization, and forecasting. With little effort, you can apply these advanced analytical techniques to your new or existing spreadsheets to create more accurate cost and financial predictions and better informed business decisions.

Crystal Ball is for anyone who uses spreadsheets and needs to forecast uncertain results. Primary Crystal Ball marketing applications include business case analysis, market share forecasting, new product forecasting prior to development, business development, new market analysis, and ROI analysis.

Marketing analysts, product managers, and and product marketing managers in nearly every industry, from consumer products to manufacturing to pharmaceuticals, all rely on Crystal Ball to improve the quality of their decision-making processes.

Key risk analysis features include sensitivity analysis, correlation, historical data fitting and optimization. The sensitivity analysis helps you to understand which of the uncertain input variables are most critical and drive the uncertainty in your models. Correlation lets you link uncertain inputs and account for their positive or negative dependencies. If historical data does exist, the data fitting feature will compare the data to the distribution algorithms and calculate the best possible fit and parameters for your data. Optimization allows you to account for uncertainty and risk in simulations but still select the best possible settings (e.g., staffing levels, investment amounts, product prices) to achieve success.

With Crystal Ball, you can:

• Replace min/max estimates with more accurate range of all possible outcomes
• Eliminate multiple manual “what if” type forecasts,
• Improve your confidence in your forecasts and financial plans,
• Gain immediate insight to the inputs that drive variation and uncertainty,
• Reduce the time required to produce forecasts,
• Make knowledgeable decisions on where to focus resources, and
• Provide decision-makers with factual data that shows the risk associated with each choice.

LEARN MORE ABOUT CRYSTAL BALL FOR MARKETING APPLICATIONS

This page offers links to a growing number of resources, including recorded Web seminars, articles, white papers, case studies, and example models. Additionally, you can view a list of common uses and examples reported directly from customers using Crystal Ball. You can also download a free trial version of Crystal Ball to see how it can help improve your business forecasts and decisions!

RECORDED WEB SEMINARS

Making Informed Decisions: Using Stochastic Analysis To Plan Marketing Programs Learn how stochastic simulation tools are helping a Fortune 200 company decide whether to make a $7 million annual investment in new marketing tactics Presented by Wayde Fleener, Senior Decision Consultant at Carlson Marketing Recorded January 12, 2006	View recording Download files
Como resolver problemas complexos nas áreas de engenharia, finanças, marketing e planejamento por meio do Crystal Ball Neste seminário mostraremos como solucionar alguns problemas complexos utilizando-se planilhas eletrônicas juntamente com simulação de Monte Carlo. A simulação é realizada por meio das facilidades do Crystal Ball®. Estes exemplos são associados a quatro áreas distintas: mercado financeiro, engenharia, orçamento de capital e marketing. Recorded August 29, 2007	View recording No downloads

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WHITE PAPERS & ARTICLES

Direct Marketing Measurement with Crystal Ball By Tim J. Sweeney, Senior Manager - Customer Reporting, Alliance Data Systems	Download
Marketing Optimization Wayde Fleener, Senior Decision Consultant, Carlson Marketing Brad Davidson, Manager Decision Sciences, Carlson Marketing	Download
Retail Loyalty Program Design By Wayde Fleener, Mark Oedekoven, Carlson Marketing Group	Download

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CASE STUDIES

Provisioning Customers Sprint Calls on Crystal Ball to Properly Provision Customers	Download
Interpreting Market Demands France Telecom Calls on Crystal Ball to Interpret Market Demands	Download

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EXAMPLE MODELS

Critical Path / Time to Market Analysis Detail: This model can be used to analyze a project schedule or the time it would take to get a product to market. The goal of this model is to understand the uncertainty of when the project will finish and how often a step will fall on the critical path.	Download For: Crystal Ball Level: Simple
Product Forecasting - Interactive TV Sales Detail: This model examines a product marketing and forecasting analysis of an emerging media product, Interactive TV (ITV). Colorado Cable has created a discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis that examines the success of the product over a six-year period. Monte Carlo simulation and time-series forecasting are used to provide a greater understanding and quantification of the risks inherent in a spreadsheet-based business forecast. This is the model featured in our Telecommunications quick demo, which walks you through how the model was used and what it proved.	Download For: Crystal Ball & CB Predictor Level: Simple
Marketing Model for a Pharmaceutical Company From: Hervé Thiriez, a management professor at Groupe HEC, CEO of Logma SA (a consulting company, and CEO of Editions MEV, the distributor of Crystal Ball in France. Detail: This model is a simplified version of several marketing models developed for different pharmaceutical companies including Lilly France, SANOFI, Pasteur-Mérieux (now Aventis) and Smithkline Beecham. The model measures the net present value, over 10 years, of the introduction of a new pharmaceutical product.	Download For: Crystal Ball Level: Simple

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COMMON USES & EXAMPLES

The following examples were provided by our customers and represent only some of the potential marketing applications for Crystal Ball.

• Analyze promotional pricing impact
• Analyze scenarios for new product launches and innovation projects
• Area-wide revenue planning
• Business case analysis for new product line expansion and 6 Sigma baseline and benefits projections
• Determine the best product offering, needed inventory levels and break-even point
• Forecasting expected profit returns for a new product
• Forecast fiber demand
• Forecasting and modeling sales commissions
• Forecasting of future sales
• Gas marketing to develop pricing views at major trading hubs across North America
• Market analysis and project profitability
• Modeling competitive pricing and the resulting impact to firm's positioning and bottom line
• Modeling demand vs. capacity for an array of product mixes
• Optimize development programs
• ROI analysis
• Sales history analysis and modeling for shipped products (to better forecast sales for future titles)
• Sensitivity analysis of market share and revenue projections
• Statistical marketing analysis for segmentation decisions
• Strategic product planning
  

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