One trick to productivity and quality improvement in managing complexity is knowing when to strive for predicatability and when to position to respond to randomness. In the HBR November subscriber article, "A Leader's Framework for Decision-Making," Dave Snowden and Mary Boone describe the Cynefin framework to distinguish between simple, complicated, complex, chaotic and disorderly cause-effect relationships in business situations. See Futurelab for more. B2B sales can definately be too complex to pre-define - at least where they are large, custom and specified by RFP. For B2SME (I just made up that acronym, sorry), however, control of product offers, pricing, sales process and proposal structure is under the control of the selling business. This makes it complicated but not unpredictable or unknown, so processes and variables can be documented - and automated.