Sales and Marketing Excellence????

Michael Webb said this in an article I ran  across the other day on the web:

"Ask production managers how their business is going, and they’ll be able to provide projections based on carefully defined measurements of facts. They’ll be able to translate their figures from operational into financial terms in the blink of an eye. And their answers will turn out to be mostly correct in the end.

Ask sales and marketing managers how things are going, and they’ll typically say “Great!” If they’re lucky, they’ll be able to point to a big customer order that recently landed and to say “We’re ahead of plan!” However, their projections usually don’t turn out to be correct in the end."

Michael has some great material and I encourage you to read his book Salesa and Marketing the Six Sigma Way. It is on my bookshelf and one of the books I recommend.