Note that sales people are usually trivial to measure. Look at their quota and their sales and you are pretty much done. With other departments it is considerably harder.
I agree with your basic premise that it's harder to objectively measure other departments as easily as sales quotas and top-line revenues.
However, I'd like to provide some additional metrics that I know other field organizations [have] use[d] (including ours):
Services - Professional Services (PS) margin, bookings, customer satisfaction scores, normalized mean project completions, budget ($ or hrs) actuals vs. estimates
Support - mean time ticket resolution, ticket volume, Maintenance & Support (M&S) margin, cust sat scores, # feature enhancements
You and every other HN reader know that all metrics are flawed in some way, but I'd still like to point out that although Sales quotas are easily judged, many organizations struggle to quickly/easily quantify the frequency with which sales people sacrifice longer-term sales for short-term quarterly wins.
However, I'd like to provide some additional metrics that I know other field organizations [have] use[d] (including ours):
Services - Professional Services (PS) margin, bookings, customer satisfaction scores, normalized mean project completions, budget ($ or hrs) actuals vs. estimates
Support - mean time ticket resolution, ticket volume, Maintenance & Support (M&S) margin, cust sat scores, # feature enhancements
You and every other HN reader know that all metrics are flawed in some way, but I'd still like to point out that although Sales quotas are easily judged, many organizations struggle to quickly/easily quantify the frequency with which sales people sacrifice longer-term sales for short-term quarterly wins.