Can sales be a process driven function ?

I have two incidents to share. Both are different but have something in common-structured work

Incident 1:

Around two months back I had been to a power plant to meet a customer. He was the head of operations there. After finishing our sales presentation he was courteous enough to show us around.
It was a plant that runs in three shifts, eight hours of each. There were around eight hundred people working.

He explained us that the target amount of production is decided by the company head office. Each department like procurement, operations, maintenance knows about the exact targets and work accordingly.

An employee is supposed to report at his work place at the exact shift start time and there will be no exceptions as the finger print detector records the exact time of entry and exit.

I could see a perfectly systematic and smooth flow of operations going on. There were no idle employees. Everybody is fully engaged in what they are supposed to do. We could also see ending of a shift as the big siren announced the end of shift an army of fresh set of employees entered the premises.

I could see satisfaction mixed exhaustion in the eyes of  employees who finished the shift and walking towards exit.

Incident 2:

A visit to any State Bank of India branch at around 11 o clock in the morning can be termed as an adventure. Huge number of people flock the branch. We have still people who hate to use plastic cards and prefer metal tokens to withdraw the funds physically from the branch. All the counters in the branch are full with customers.

 A young and intelligent guy post his graduation, works hard with numerical, logical and all other problems and ends up as probationary officer in the SBI only to find himself solving the problems of two hundred plus people a day. An hour of being in queue I could see that he was not able to even pick up his mobile to attend the personal calls.

In case of the power plant the employee is forced to work because of machines.

In case of bank the employee is forced to work because of customers

But in case of sales, most of the times it is either the pressure to deliver or in a few cases the desire to be a performer makes a person work.

Most of the days a large part of the day is either wasted or not utilized properly in any sales function.

When the end of the month approaches, there will be mad rush and even twenty four hours will not be sufficient.

There are smart sales managers who try to make the people to work by igniting the desire to be performer.

When the company tries to implement systems like online recording of appointments, sales calls made then they are using the factory model of making the people to work because of machines.

But most of the times it is short lived. Slowly people start taking exceptions to the system. Though sales is a different kind of function where certain degree of flexibility is required, too much of flexibility seems to be breaking the very essence of work.

Let the organisations think of having a balanced process to engage people in a productive way which will reduce the heart burns and disappointments for the sales people.