Every day we see more over-funded startups, those with millions of VC dollars, hiring brain dead sales managers who do nothing but measure the number of emails or the number of weekly sales calls a rep makes.
Metrics-driven-management is stupid incarnate.
A good enterprise rep will manage a territory as an organic whole. He or she will know the boutique consultants, the influencers, the early adopters and work them to get into deals well before a competitor.
The creative rep finds a potential deal well before an inbound marketing campaign finds one. By the time the inbound marketing department finds a lead, it is being worked by the same department at 4 competitors. The great rep is already there—laying the groundwork.
But more and more, these over-funded startups hire sales managers, often with MBAs, who think blind activity is the major ingredient for enterprise sales success. It is not. The winning formula is understanding the unique benefit a product brings a specific customer—find that prospect before anyone else does—and manage the trajectory of the sale.
Massive, spam email campaigns do not get you there. While quantity can be tracked, creative quality cannot be measured until the end of a full year in a territory.
Your metric is qualified pipeline—period, end of story. Any other metric is nonsense. If a rep has 4X pipeline, he or she wins. Otherwise, it is a gamble. And you do not get pipeline with blind spam emails.
If all you have to do is send out emails, make X calls, why not hire monkeys?
A sales monkey can do all that is needed here. But, the brain dead sales managers from these over funded startups, actually track numbers of phone calls, numbers of emails sent. They abhor creativity because it cannot be measured in Salesforce.com.
If you have a manager who tracks this stuff for a field level enterprise rep, fire them today.
You need the kind of reps who would never work for this person. So the reps you have may well now be useless if they did not rebel.
Territory management is all about finding the deal looking for you. It is not about spam, about BS emails, about interruption marketing.
That is what stupid people, with MBAs, do.