It is only natural for salespeople to sand-bag their numbers to defend themselves.

The concept is that salespeople will update the various stages of a sale as it progresses through the “pipeline”. The management team is able to see how much sales they ought to do based on the amount of deals in the pipeline.

But, as salespeople know, negotiations and deals are not all linear and do not all move at the same pace. So, to avoid “missing targets” salespeople often underestimate the amount of business they are working on so that they are not held accountable for closing business that is in an early stage. Or they underrepresent the amount of the deal (for the same reason).

So salespeople do not always represent what they are actually working on.

BUT, and here’s the problem, even when they enter accurate information, not all sales transactions work the same way, so extrapolating total future sales based on a lot of early stage discussions is consistently incorrect.

I’m not saying its of no value, but its not as good a predictor as many companies expect, and shouldn’t be used as the “carrot and whip” for compensating salespeople.

How do CRM systems encourage salespeople to cheat the system? (I am not a sales person, so this is for my edification).

What, specifically and in your opinion, is it about CRM dashaboards of common CRM products that provide misleading information?

How do CRM dashboards set sales people up to fail?