This reminds me of a passage from Crossing The Chasm, Geoffrey Moore, where he talks about sales discipline. Some sales are really freakin expensive.

  Now, how bad can this really be? I mean, sales are good,
  right? Surely things can just work themselves out, and we
  will discover our market, albeit retroactively, let to it
  by our customers, yes? The true answers to the previous
  three questions are: (1) disastrous, (2) not always,
  and (3) never in a million years.

This was written pre-web but I think the warning is still valid.