(Hopefully you read the blog title with a Deep South accent.)

Happy holidays, reader!

I’m going to begin this post with a slightly embarrassing self-quote from 5 years ago, when I was a first-year MBA student. The following is an excerpt from the introduction I wrote for a marketing plan group assignment.

You can tell I was really feeling myself when I wrote that… And, you know what? I still am!

And here’s why.

 APQC has just published some pretty insightful sales and marketing benchmarks that cover a wide range of activities, including:

• sales and marketing performance,
• customer experience,
• segmentation and personalization,
• analytics and information maturity, and
• behavior analysis/customer insights.

This information should give you a good feel for the state of the sales and marketing union. And if you want something a little more specific, stay tuned! We’ll be rolling out industry-specific cuts of this data over the next few weeks, but I wanted to get this data into your hands in time for the winter solstice.

Follow me on Twitter @MSIMS_APQC or find me on LinkedIn.