Where is your sales organisation heading?

Most people assume that installing a CRM system will solve all sales performance issues, in a similar way to most men assuming that buying a flat pack wardrobe means you instantly have a brand new, wonderful looking wardrobe. Anyone who has sat with an Allen key, a piece of wood that simply doesn't make logistical sense, and a sense of self pity will know this simply isn't the case.

The problem is, there is a lot of useful data to take in and as an expert on the subject suggests, CRM systems "treat their own data like an island. Useful sales analytics can only typically come from bringing together information from Sales, Marketing and Finance systems." The fact that they don't combine effectively means analysing your sales performance can actually be much more challenging.

Of course, the emergence of systems like Salesforce mean we can track more data than ever before but if you were to ask a sales manager if he knew which sales tactics were working best, or which customers are proving more profitable using just a CRM system alone, he'd probably struggle to start the sentence without the line 'probably this' or 'probably that'.

There is now a free assessment online for sales leaders to assess themselves relative to their peer groups across a carefully selected set of sales performance metrics. It's a really useful ten minutes worth of time so I'd recommend giving it a go. You'll probably be more than a little bit interested in the results too...

Take the assessment