The Sales Performance Suite

One should be cautious about putting too much weight on CRM software to quantify and "manage" sales efforts from the 'ole "ivory tower". These type of calculations fail to take into account real world factors such as: How did certain "heavy hitter" sales folks get to where they are? More often than not, they have simply been in the right place at the right time, and inherited a great situation from a better sales person or business owner that has either retired, moved on, or been promoted. They are just smart enough not to screw things up, managing to add a new client here and there. Other factors such as the politics of territories,including favoritism, project geographical location vs.home office sales rep (local guy gets paid via larger PO's, location field guy services job for less pay), project bid ($$ volume) allocation fairness, among other real-world issues, cannot possibly be accounted for. Often, your hardest working, best sales person (in terms of organic growth) will appear to be a lower level performer, when actually, they are your best horse in the stable. By now, you can probably see what I think about CRM software. It can and should be a tool and a tool only, used by experienced sales managers that have a real understanding of sales within their respective industry, supported by a company culture that can see past the next quarter. Unfortunately in today's world, the manager of sales is increasingly an IT oriented office person (put nicely), with no clue or ability to understand that he/she is letting the CRM software "tail" wag the sales team "dog", patting themselves on their own backs for the next dashboard stat they just dreamed up to get your "diamond in the rough" down in the trenches fired.....all the while wondering why nothing is happening......  
 
 
 
While a firm needs to consider sales as an investment that needs to be accounted for, more often than not, sales folks are (wrongly) held accountable for an organizations internal issues simply out of their control. On top of that, a lot of folks want sales people to grow their business for FREE (i.e. straight cmmission, draw etc.) But, that's another topic isn't it?