Don Marti

Tue 27 Sep 2005 03:56:36 PM PDT

Sales forecasting

Sales people seem to like anything better than forecasting. I don't know anyone who wouldn't rather cold-call all the "leads" from the "Win an iPod" contest. But how many sales people do you know who had money on one or more football games last weekend? (If you're not in Nevada, don't answer that.)

Now that Google is doing an internal predictive market, I'm willing to bet, I mean, invest 0.75/share, in the probability that at least one of the CRM vendors will start offering predictive markets inside their software.

Integrating the predictive market with the CRM suite means that you can set it up to enforce policies such as "don't bet against a project in which you're involved", which would be Bad.