Sales is in the process of incorporating art and science so that a competitive advantage can be maintained in this ever changing ‘normal from now on’ environment.  I was thinking about the science aspect and I went back to when I was a civil engineer and having to work with the forces of nature, especially in dealing with fluids.  I had to study fluid statics and dynamics.

Then it dawned on me that if I tried to relate it to sales, statics would be the forecast, which is a snapshot in time, whilst dynamics would be pipeline management measuring the flow, viscosity, pipeline capacity, etc.

We do have the tools for sales forecasting whether they be CRM systems or even the plain old spreadsheet.  That tells us what it looks like at a specific point in time. What we do not know is how it got to that state and what is likely to be ahead.  We not only need to be able to measure metrics such as sales flow through the pipeline, but also acceleration for the different revenue streams handled by different channels and look for past experiences and make adjustments to the various variables so that turbulence if not stagnation does not occur.

Sales Performance Management gives us the dynamics of sales.  It needs to incorporate time as a variable as well as monitoring the qualitative and quantative aspects of sales. It will then be possible to monitor trends and learn from past experiences so that we have a smoother flow in the pipeline.