[prepend]

I’m not in sales but I remember my firm having sales pipeline meetings 20 years ago where sales people would talk about stuff that happened. It was all manual and anecdotal. So the sales pipeline was only in someone’s head or maybe a spreadsheet they hacked out once a quarter or whatever.

I think the difference today that the author referenced is that with Salesforce stuff like number of leads, contacts, conversion, revenue and profit per conversion, etc is all captured and reportable in sort of real-time. There’s still lots of gut inputs like how the meeting went or having people estimate probability of closure, etc. But now it’s more systematic.

I don’t know if it’s more successful, but it seems like I get more sales calls and repeat contact attempts.