Why Your Sales Forecasts Keep Missing — Blame Marketing?
- JJ Ong
- Jul 21
- 3 min read
Quick Summary
Sales forecast accuracy is crucial for controlling supply chain costs — and marketing strategies play a major role in that accuracy.
Push marketing (e.g., ads, sales, influencer promos) drives short-term demand but creates unpredictable spikes that are hard to forecast.
Pull marketing (e.g., SEO, branding, content) builds long-term, more stable demand that aligns better with historical data and forecasting models.
Push strategies risk over- or under-forecasting due to inconsistent results influenced by timing, platforms, and external trends.
Pull strategies tend to offer clearer demand signals, often tied to measurable trends like seasonality or engagement.
The best approach is often a hybrid strategy, combining push and pull — but success depends on close collaboration between marketing and supply chain teams.
Sharing marketing plans and expected campaign impact helps operations plan more accurately and reduce cost risks.
In our post last week, we discussed how sales forecast accuracy directly impacts your supply chain’s total cost. This week, we’re going to dive deeper into one of the most common yet overlooked root causes of sales forecast inaccuracy — marketing.
According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), marketing is “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value…” Most of us already understand marketing in terms of the classic 4Ps — Product, Price, Place, Promotion — but today, I want to zoom in on push and pull marketing strategies, because they significantly influence how accurate (or inaccurate) your sales forecasts can be.
Let’s start with the definitions.
Push Marketing | Pull Marketing |
A strategy where a company actively “pushes” messages, products, or promotions out to consumers. This can be done through a variety of digital or physical channels — such as social media ads, influencer sponsorships, retail displays, flash sales, and email blasts. The key here is that the company is initiating contact and trying to drive demand directly. | Creating demand organically. Instead of chasing customers, the brand builds value, reputation, and trust so that consumers eventually seek out the product themselves. This might involve content marketing, SEO, branding efforts, and social proof such as reviews or testimonials. It’s a slower burn, but often results in more sustainable, loyal demand. |
Now, how do these strategies impact sales forecast accuracy?
Push marketing can be unpredictable. Most push tactics rely on time-limited promotions, urgency-driven language, or a “don’t miss out” approach that entices consumers to make quick decisions. While these campaigns can generate spikes in demand, they often create artificial buying patterns that are hard to replicate in future forecasts. A company may know a campaign is planned, but digital push strategies — especially those online — are harder to quantify. Why? Because online platforms have almost unlimited reach, and customer behavior can be influenced by countless unpredictable factors such as algorithms, competitor ads, or viral trends.
Even if companies attempt to base their forecasts on past push campaign results, the data may not always be consistent due to changes in timing, platforms, consumer sentiment, or external events. This inconsistency often leads to either over-forecasting (resulting in excess inventory) or under-forecasting (leading to stockouts) — both of which increase total supply chain costs.
Pull marketing, by contrast, tends to provide more stable and forecastable demand. Since the consumer is the one initiating the purchase journey, the signals are clearer. Pull-based demand often correlates with measurable trends such as seasonality, holidays, weather conditions, or content engagement levels. As a result, companies using pull strategies can often lean on more reliable historical data to inform their forecasts.
So, which one is better?
There’s no universal answer. The choice between push and pull marketing depends on your industry, product lifecycle, consumer buying behavior, and sales channels (online vs. offline). In many cases, the most effective approach is a hybrid strategy — where push campaigns are layered over a strong pull foundation, supported by data analytics and refined with human judgment.
To improve forecast accuracy, it’s important for marketing and supply chain teams to collaborate. When marketing shares campaign timelines, platforms, and expected impact clearly, it empowers the operations team to plan smarter and reduce cost risk.
Conclusion
Marketing doesn’t just drive sales — it shapes the patterns that supply chain teams rely on to forecast demand. While push marketing can create rapid demand surges, it also introduces volatility that makes planning difficult. Pull marketing offers more stable signals but takes time to build. The key to improving forecast accuracy isn’t choosing one over the other, but aligning both strategies with transparent communication and data sharing between marketing and operations. When these teams work hand-in-hand, businesses can strike the right balance between agility and predictability — reducing costs, avoiding stockouts, and ultimately delivering a better customer experience.