3 min read

3 Reasons Your Sales Reps Hate Their CRM

Field sales reps spend less than 39% of their time selling. The rest is spent on administrative tasks. Since they only get paid when they make sales, it’s no wonder they bitterly resent administrative tasks, especially entering their call notes into their CRM.

3 Reasons Your Sales Reps Hate Their CRM

We’ve learned firsthand, through both industry research and the school of hard knocks, that there are 3 main reasons sales people hate CRMs. Here’s what we’ve found…

Reason #1: Brain Rewiring

No matter what your team sells, salesmanship is a career of connections. Your team talks with their customers, talks with you as their sales manager, and talks through every part of the process to make it happen.

Even if they’re securing a sale through email or a chat client, that’s talking more than it is typing. A sales rep’s brain is simply wired to talk.

In contrast, updating a CRM is data-entry. That’s a solitary action that asks for a different focus and different skills.

The structure of most CRMs inherently asks a sales rep to stop what they’re doing, sit down, change gears, and do a completely different task before they—wait for it—change gears, stand up, and get back to selling.

According to Fast Company, despite most employees shifting back to whatever work they interrupt with other tasks, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back on task—which means you’re losing valuable employee time and mental energy on multiple fronts.

What your sales reps need is a system that focuses on their strengths. A system that keeps them going when they’re on a roll and has their back with all the info they need when they’re looking for direction.

Reason #2: The Time Sink

Studies show that it takes the average sales person about 1.5 hours to manually enter information into a CRM each day.

Now compound that over a week, a month, and a year. If you assume a sales rep works 20 days per month, that’s 25 hours worth of database maintenance they’re doing. That’s 300 hours over the year.

Imagine spending almost 13 days straight doing something related to your job that doesn’t get you paid! Imagine paying a sales rep to do that.

You don’t have to do the math. I’ll do it right here:

Assuming you pay your rep $40/hour (~$80,000 annual compensation)…

  • That 25 hours per month turns into $1,000 a month
  • That $1,000 per month turns into $12,000 per year
  • And that $12,000 is per sales rep—how big is your team?

Does your CRM save you over $120,000/year for your team of 10?

You need a CRM that streamlines your data AND frees up your sales reps’ day. Every one of those 1.5 hours they’re burning with data entry is 1.5 hours they’re not selling. It’s costing them money, and it’s costing you money.

Reason #3: It’s All About the Gains

Your sales reps don’t make the choice to buy or implement a CRM. That’s your job. Anything new takes some getting used to, and the key is to make sure they understand what it does for them. You have to sell them on the idea, and they’ll only buy in if there’s a benefit for them.

For all this discussion on the failings of CRMs, you may be tempted to scrap the whole idea. But a CRM is supposed to make your life easier. As a sales manager, you gain access to sales tracking and organization. With the right CRM, your sales reps should benefit from all this transparency and efficiency too.

The trick is not to simply sell them past the downsides, but to rather get yourself a CRM that actually benefits them.

A good CRM should help your sales team keep track of all their appointment notes, prompt them for follow-up tasks, and arrange their scheduled appointments on a calendar that keeps their momentum going from one sale to the next.

A good CRM makes their lives easier and enables them to keep doing what they’re good at doing—making more money without creating more work. A good CRM is like having their very own virtual assistant.

So the solution isn’t ditch all CRMs. The solution is get the right CRM. You’ll need one that does a few things:

  • Keeps your sales reps from interrupting their work flow.
  • Doesn’t ask too much time out of your sales reps’ day.
  • Provides clear efficiency for everyone involved.

The good news is that there are a lot of options to look through. The great news is that you can get your hands on a demo of Voze here. Our CRM involves a minute or two of dictation between calls and then our virtual representative takes care of all the data entry, calendaring, and more so you and your sales reps have it all at your fingertips. See just how easy it is today.

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