Those fortunate enough to be present at the recent The Next Level sales team optimisation breakfast seminar in Melbourne enjoyed a vibrant debate on that age-old balancing act regarding right system and right players on the sales team.  As yours truly extolled the virtues of a scientific, even mathematical approach to gathering good data to run annual sales team optimisation, including ….

• profiling and classifying customers
• calculating break even point on margin generation required to warrant the investment of minimum level account management
• cost of a visit

… a violent agreement furiously broke out.

Members of the audience engaged with expert panellists over the merits, gravitating towards a general agreement about recruiting Sales Execs into the team, based on skills required to generate and apply these types of analytical approaches to assessing and managing customers, prospects and territory.

No!  I say.  You’ve picked up the wrong end of the stick!

Yes!  Absolutely………..recruit with this type of analytical and scientific skillset.  But not to generate and apply. Rather …. to execute and leverage, in an  environment that the company has created which features a Sales management system that dynamically does that for the whole team.

I posit ………. This is the essence of competitive advantage Sales management systems for the B2B environment.