Like marketing research, sales forecasting utilizes a wide array of tools and techniques to enhance the accuracy of the forecast. For example, ____________ combines and averages the outlooks of top executives from different functional areas in a firm or firms. ______________ weighs each year's sales data, giving greater weight to results from the most recent years.
A)Delphi technique; Jury of executive opinion
B)Simple random sampling; Exponential smoothing
C)Sampling; Linear regression
D)Jury of executive opinion; Exponential smoothing
E)Statistical averaging; Linear regression

Question

​Like marketing research, sales forecasting utilizes a wide array of tools and techniques to enhance the accuracy of the forecast. For example, ____________ combines and averages the outlooks of top executives from different functional areas in a firm or firms. ______________ weighs each year's sales data, giving greater weight to results from the most recent years.
A)Delphi technique; Jury of executive opinion
B)Simple random sampling; Exponential smoothing
C)Sampling; Linear regression
D)Jury of executive opinion; Exponential smoothing
E)Statistical averaging; Linear regression

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The Delphi technique involves anonymous input and feedback from experts, while simple random sampling and sampling are methods of selecting a subset of a larger population for analysis. Statistical averaging is a general term that could apply to both the Delphi technique and the jury of executive opinion, but only the latter involves executives from within the company. Exponential smoothing and linear regression are both time series forecasting methods, but exponential smoothing places more emphasis on recent data while linear regression looks at trends over time. Therefore, the best choice is D, as both the Delphi technique and the jury of executive opinion are methods of combining subjective opinions, but only the jury of executive opinion involves executives from different functional areas within a firm, and exponential smoothing is a technique for weighting recent sales data.

​Like Marketing Research, Sales Forecasting Utilizes a Wide Array of Tools

Like Marketing Research, Sales Forecasting Utilizes a Wide Array of Tools