For years, sales performance management (SPM) has been the standard for structuring, tracking, and rewarding direct sales teams. It gave leaders proven tools to set quotas, assign territories, measure attainment, and connect performance with compensation.
SPM is still valuable, but it was built for a world where sales alone powered growth.
Today, growth is a team effort. Revenue comes from across the organization — sales, marketing, customer success, renewals, partner channels, and even specialized roles like field service or call centers. Customer journeys now span multiple touchpoints, and pricing models are shifting toward value, recurring, and usage-based revenue. And market conditions change too quickly for static, annual plans to keep up.
That’s why forward-looking organizations are shifting from SPM to revenue performance management (RPM) — a broader, more connected approach that treats revenue as a company-wide performance outcome, not just a sales result. RPM aligns every role that contributes to growth, integrates the data behind their performance, and manages the entire revenue engine as one.
From measuring sales to managing revenue
SPM was designed for a simpler revenue model where sales was the primary growth driver. This method allows teams to effectively measure sales activity and align incentives, but the focus of SPM is narrow:
- Who it covers: Primarily quota-carrying sales roles
- Planning cycle: Annual or semiannual
- Adjustments: Often reactive and based on performance changes
That no longer reflects how revenue is generated today.
In most organizations, revenue now flows through a multi-channel ecosystem:
- SDRs generating pipeline
- Customer success teams driving adoption and renewals
- Renewal managers ensuring account retention
- Partner teams expanding market reach
- Specialists influencing deals with deep product expertise
- Contact center agents driving sales and preventing churn
Each team works toward different metrics, but their combined performance determines whether the company hits its revenue targets.
RPM expands the lens. It integrates all revenue contributors into a single plan, aligns them to shared goals, and manages their performance continuously. The focus shifts from tracking results after the fact to orchestrating coordinated plays across the entire GTM engine.
The blind spots of SPM
Organizations relying solely on SPM often run into familiar challenges that limit growth:
Revenue does not equal new bookings alone
Ignoring retention and expansion misses the most profitable growth opportunities.
Planning in silos
Sales, marketing, and customer success operate on separate priorities, creating friction instead of synergy.
One-and-done planning
Annual plans can’t keep up with changing markets, competitive moves, or shifting buyer behavior.
Limited data scope
SPM tools typically pull from CRM and comp systems only. RPM integrates marketing, customer success, finance, and HR data for a full picture.
The result: Well-structured sales plans that miss the bigger picture. RPM closes these gaps by treating planning as a continuous, integrated process. This process evolves in real time as conditions change, rather than staying static until the next planning cycle.
RPM: Integrated data and continuous management
One of the biggest shifts from SPM to RPM is in how data is managed and used. The insights needed for effective GTM planning, incentives and rewards, and sales forecasting are rarely found in one place — they’re spread across CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, customer success tools, finance applications, and HR databases.
SPM doesn’t solve that. RPM demands it.
By unifying these sources, revenue leaders can:
- See true contribution by role and channel to understand where growth is really coming from.
- Model trade-offs between investment options, such as adding SDRs versus expanding customer success coverage.
- Allocate resources to the highest-value markets, segments, or opportunities.
- Spot underperformance early and make adjustments before it impacts results.
RPM doesn’t treat planning as a “set it and forget it” exercise. Plans and forecasts are continuously updated as actual performance comes in. This agility is what turns planning from a static spreadsheet into a living, strategic RPM approach.
Orchestrating the entire revenue team
SPM typically lives in sales operations. RPM broadens ownership across the business:
- Finance aligns headcount and investment with revenue goals.
- Marketing fuels demand in priority segments.
- Customer success teams drive adoption, retention, and expansion.
- Partners coordinate co-selling and market expansion.
- HR builds hiring and onboarding into capacity plans.
Without this coordination, even the most detailed plans break down in execution. RPM provides the structure, shared data, and feedback loops to keep everyone moving in the same direction.
Technology as the enabler
The kind of alignment and agility that RPM delivers isn’t possible without the right technology foundation. While SPM tools are typically built to manage sales compensation, territories, and quotas, RPM platforms are designed to support the entire revenue ecosystem.
ISG’s research underscores the growing role of AI in RPM — from forecasting and territory balancing to compensation design and performance optimization. With an AI-infused platform like Anaplan, revenue leaders can move beyond spreadsheets to a connected, scenario planning environment that accelerates decisions and execution.
The bottom line
SPM will continue to have a place for the foreseeable future — it remains essential for managing sales teams effectively. But on its own, it’s too narrow for today’s complex, multi-channel revenue reality.
RPM is evolution. It transforms performance management, planning, and forecasting from siloed, point-in-time exercise into connected, dynamic capabilities.
With RPM, growth becomes a shared responsibility supported by integrated data, real-time agility, and cross-functional alignment. This isn’t just about changing tools. It’s about changing how your organization thinks about revenue. That’s why the shift from SPM to RPM is one of the most important transformations revenue organizations can make today.
