No names to spare the blushes of the poor CEO who posted it. But I just could not resist quoting and commenting on this question from Linked In.
“is salesforce.com lying to you?”
“Let me begin by saying that we use salesforce.com and LOVE IT. However, what we find is that in many cases the data that sales reps load into salesforce.com is outdated and does not reflect the true value of the sales pipeline. It appears that statistically, about 80% of deals in a pipeline are dead, thus the analogy “is salesforce.com lying to you”. Obviously salesforce.com is not lying, but the data you are relying on might be. I’m curious what experience others have had with the accuracy of pipeline information and how you’ve gone about cleansing/validating pipeline data.”
My Thoughts?
This guy badly needs some help.
He’s paying a bunch of money to sales managers and sales reps, and presumably some change to salesforce.
In return he’s getting complete garbage! Worst of all he’s displaying his own ignorance and corroborating the Peter Principle. What a mess.
These guys obviously bought a marketing message from somebody -” Use this software and your incompetent sales organization will suddenly transform into sales management best practice”. “All it takes is a little change, because salesforce will take care of the technology, process, and management. Foolish not too, really.”
Well here we have the results. Amazing.
Forget the application. If you spend money on something which turns out to be completely useless 80% of the time would you tell people how much you “loved it”. No, and neither would I.
Far from “loving it” this CEO should be hauling his vendor, managers and sales guys over the coals, finding out where everything is going so wrong, and ways to improve it.
To my shame I didn’t leave a response – there were already > 2o there posted by the usual crowd and jammed with management clap-trap.
But the real deal here is:
- Sales guys will never properly use an application which gets in their way and doesn’t improve their ability to sell stuff. They get paid on results, and fired where those results aren’t good enough. The WANT to sell. If the software helped they’d use it.
- Sales managers who measure their teams on numbers – calls, prospects, pitches, proposals – will always get pipelines full of garbage.
- CEO’s who think it’s normal to have pipelines 80% full of lost deals should find a job with a bank. They’re living in cloud cuckoo land.
Bottom line is there is something seriously wrong with this business. The product doesn’t stand up in the market, the pricing is out of line, and the marketing people must be on vacation, permanently.
The sales guys are just collecting their salary until something better comes along.
I’m not a big fan of salesforce but in this case feel obliged to support it.
Good or Bad – no software can make up for a bad business model managed by incompetent people.
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