Measuring the impact of the Sales Force

K. Scott Allen solves a common problem for developers - how to define the impact of what salespeople do.

I first became familiar with this phenomenon when working for a software development outfit. I really liked the salesman (singular), who taught me the term "Salesman's License". This refers to the fact that the customer is always right and can only be sold if the requested feature is "in the pipeline". He took some license with the current state of our products, based on what he thought we could do or were actually thinking about doing.

Thanks for helping me find a vocabulary to talk about this issue! ;^)