Hello.  I’m Paul McCord.  You may know me from The Sales and Sales Management Blog, my books on sales, or my articles and interviews.  Whether you know me or not, welcome to The Management Curve, a blog about how new technology is changing how salespeople and sales function is managed.

Sales managers are in a precarious position.  The old methods and ways of managing salespeople and the sales function as a whole is changing rapidly due to the advent of new technology that gives managers at all levels more information–and accountability–than ever before.  It started with CRM and has advanced to SPM and SFA programs.

These programs are changing the role of sales management like never before.  That change–current and forthcoming–is the subject of this blog.  We’ll be discussing what this technology is including all of its various manifestations, how it is currently being used and changing the management function, and more importantly, how the technology is evolving and how those changes are going to radically change sales management.

Over the coming weeks, months, and years, we will

  • be engaging in real world discussion and making predictions and guesses about what is in the future
  • we will look at very specific programs–their pros and their cons–and how they are being used
  • have guest authors from sales management, product development, and managers themselves write about their views on the subject–both those that agree with my thesis and those that don’t
  • we will discuss what these changes mean for individual salespeople and managers, as well as what they mean for the company as a whole

Our focus on technology is narrow–focusing only on those programs that seek to gather and collate information on sales activities and processes.  There is, of course, a whole host of other technologies in existence and coming on board everyday that impact sales.  If your interested in those technologies I would suggest visiting Sales Team Tools whose focus is on the broad spectrum of technology designed for or being used within the sales function be individual salespeople or sales team managers.

I encourage you to bookmark this page or add it to your RSS feed reader.  As the days, weeks, and months go by, I hope you find this site interesting, thought provoking and most of all helpful in dealing with the upheaval in sales management that has only just begun.