Should you track your sales people’s sales activity?

One of the best sales professionals I’ve met uses a day planner to manage her entire selling process. Her name is Debbie, and although her company has invested heavily in a state-of-the-art sales activity tracking system, she refuses to use it. Debbie insists she doesn’t want anyone monitoring her sales activity and that updating forecasting data slows her down and gets in the way of selling. So, she sticks to doing things her way.

As you can imagine, Debbie’s refusal to use the company’s system is a challenge for her manager. Because, not only does Debbie refuse to follow their process, she’s also a sales superstar and the company’s top rep.

Her superstar status comes from the fact that she doesn’t just make her quota; she consistently exceeds it by 150-300%. She personally accounts for 25-30% of the company’s revenue and has for years.

Debbie’s company has mandated that everyone follow their sales tracking process to help sales forecasting. But, this applies to everyone but Debbie. She can keep doing things her way.

It sounds like Debbie has a spineless manager, right? It might sound that way but, that’s defiantly not the case. If you asked, Debbie’s manager would say:

‘When a sales rep becomes a superstar, I work for them and they call the shots. Until then, they work for me and I’m going to monitor everything they do.’

If every sales professional was a superstar, we might not need systems for monitoring sales activity. We’d all be exceeding our sales quotas, all of the time and we’d all be happy. Of course, this isn’t usually the case and most sales teams aren’t made up of all superstars.

I don’t know of any technology solution that will turn a poor sales rep around. However, there are systems that can accurately monitor sales activity and with the information they provide, managers might just have a shot at a sales team of all “superstars.”