In my work with a wide variety of organizations, I'm always on the lookout for new ways in which companies are applying business performance management (BPM) to have a direct, material impact on their goals. In the current economic climate (not surprisingly, perhaps, since cost management initiatives using BPM are already well established) I've noticed an increase in adoption of BPM to help address revenue growth issues.

I've also noticed that finance leaders are pushing their organizations to take BPM into other areas of the business, most notably into sales and sales operations, to help lead the revenue growth charge.

Sales has traditionally been slow to adopt BPM because finance-sponsored systems used to be less granular and less agile than sales required -- think daily and weekly reports versus monthly and quarterly ones, commissionable versus recognized revenue, and statutory versus management reporting. In addition, finance-focused BPM tended to be disconnected from customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

This is all changing now (See Exhibit 1).

By leveraging existing and new BPM processes and technologies, and by introducing a culture of performance -- for more on which, see Profiles in Performance, by Howard Dresner (John Wiley & Sons, 2010) -- finance and sales ops departments are working together to bring the promise of BPM to bear on the opportunities of customer acquisition, retention, and success.

Many current BPM processes and technologies can be naturally extended to encompass newer applications of BPM. For instance, overall revenue planning, workforce planning, and product sales targets can and should extend to, correlate with, and take advantage of the weekly sales forecasting process.

So what's stopping organizations from doing this today?

In this article, I'll highlight some of the missing pieces in the sales decision process, and I'll give recommendations for using BPM to close the gap between sales planning and revenue growth attainment, using the sales forecast as the bridge.