In any other business division, if productivity was falling while spending on inputs to improve productivity was rising, someone might question the inputs.

But the sales and marketing department isn't treated like any other.

Such are the findings of the 2014 RPMG Revenue Performance Index.

Compared with 2012, fewer selling opportunities that enter the pipeline are making it to completion. Sales reps are finding their jobs more difficult.

"There has rarely been a better time to be a CRM vendor or training provider," reads the executive summary.

"Unfortunately however, the problem they are supposed to be solving looks to be actually getting worse."

What's more, many of the 172 CEOs surveyed for the index seem to be resigned to having an underperforming sales force.

One anonymous CEO summed up the sales and marketing division as "acceptable mediocrity".

Despite CEOs having all manner of improved sales performance aspirations, the survey found:

• 68 per cent of CEOs said their organisations either missed or would miss their current year target, with the average shortfall 12 per cent.
• Nonetheless, 94 per cent of CEOs were targeting sales growth for the next year of an average 23 per cent
• But 67 per cent said they were not confident of hitting the new target. 
• 18 per cent said outright they would not make it.
• 58 per cet of sales reps either missed or were missing their current year quotas and 27 per cent of them missing by more than 20 per cent.
• There has been a 12.5 per cent decline in pipeline conversion over the past two years, from 2.4 per cent to 2.1 per cent.
• That decline is part of a longer-term trend – the pipeline conversion rate has fallen 43 per cent from 3.7 per cent in 2005-06.

Concludes the summary:

"It is a continual source of frustration to see how many CEOs and CFOs who, while conceding how critical profitable sales growth is to their organisations, nonetheless appear willing to accept that different rules should somehow apply to the world of selling, or that the way things are is 'just the way it is', or that there's nothing more than can or should be done."

"The core conclusion from this index isn't that the marketing and selling environment has all-of-a-sudden become tough; it's been tough for some time. Rather it is that the world of marketing and selling (of making revenue) has already changed and continues to do so. The rules of the game are no longer controlled by the sellers, but by the buyers. And the sellers are now playing a desperate game of catch-up." 

Willy Loman would have liked the present sales environment even less than that of Death of a Salesman with aggressive revenue and margin targets and decreasing tenure.

The survey suggests a pattern of marketing and sales managers failing to meet targets and being replaced by marketing and sales managers who fail to meet targets.

RPMG, a sales and business process analytics firm, found the sales rep's job has become harder because customers are more discerning and informed.

The internet has changed the way they approach buying decisions and markets are changing rapidly as they break into different segments and sub-segments.

More stakeholders are involved in decisions with corresponding longer sales cycles and more difficult selling conversations, RPMG found.