Sales forecasting is always a tough requirement. After all, you’re forecasting the future, and, almost by definition, it’s going to be wrong. It’s merely a question of the degree of wrongness, which becomes the much vaulted new metric of “forecast accuracy”. When you’re in sales, it’s part of the badge, and anyone who complains that “it’s tough to forecast the future” should start looking for a job on the shipping dock.

Bumped into Chris Sheehan, one of the two Managing Directors at Common Angels, the other day, and we quickly got into a discussion about inside sales, and did I know of a good manager for one of his portfolio companies. Off the top of my head, no one came to mind, (Qualified Lead Opportunity to anyone reading this to ping me), but then I hesitated since I'm not sure that the terms "inside sales/outside sales" apply any longer, and when they do apply, they exist with very different meanings today from the context in which they historically (three to five years ago) had been used.

Boston is just a terrific city.  Small, easy to walk around, and one of the greatest sports towns in America.  The Patriots are either the Super Bowl Champs...or not; the Celtics are always the leaders and the Sox, well, that's another story given this year's opening season. 

As a Professor of Marketing at Tufts, (and just maybe someone who think that he knows something about sales effectiveness and optimization),I've felt like the Cobbler's Kid for about a year now. 

No, it's not hunting season in Vermont. That's in the fall last I looked, and I'm pretty sure about that since it's one of the few times of year that I don't venture too far into the woods. Largely because there are 21,000 guys out there every day stumbling around in clothes fashioned on the theme of "Mr. Deliverance goes to Wal-Mart" all with guns and live ammunition. Scares me just to think about it.