Many sales organizations continue to operate as they have for years: At headquarters, executives work with sales leaders to set revenue targets for the year. Sales teams receive top-down goals, which cascade across product lines, channels and other business dimensions. The end result is an account-level target, which is assigned to a sales rep. Because most companies do not have an easy way to complete this process – nor do they use a common system of record – they must resort to the quickest and easiest mechanism at hand: spreadsheets, a nonscalable, single-dimensional solution that does not handle complete data sets. This approach also poses challenges across key sales management functions, including planning, execution and optimization.
