3 Biggest Problems With Your CRM Data (And How To Solve Them Today)

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 your CRM.

In a recent survey, we found that field sales representatives spend an average of 1 to 1.5 hours every day updating and maintaining their CRM database.

If they work 20 days a month, that’s 25 hours spent doing data entry every month. An hour or so every day may not initially seem like a detrimental cost. But, when you look at it in aggregate, it becomes jaw dropping.

For ease of explanation, let’s assume a sales rep is paid $40 per hour. We’ll leave out benefits and other incentives and focus on the simple hourly wage. That 25 hours is taken away from each and every sales rep.

Which means that’s 25 less hours spent on making sales and building relationships with customers.

Or it’s taken from time spent with their families.

Either way, it’s not an effective use of your sales team’s valuable time.

When we look at it from a monthly standpoint, your business is spending $468.75 for each sales rep to enter data into a CRM system.

When we look at annual costs, it gets even scarier. 

That’s just for one of your sales reps.

How big is your team? Five people? Ten? Fifty?

It’s evident that the cost increases exponentially.

Try $28,000, $56,000, and $281,000 of annual costs!

It’s clear that the labor costs associated with CRM maintenance are massive.

However, you also need to assess the wide impact this loss of time creates.

You’re not just losing an hourly pay rate, you’re missing opportunities and critical business intelligence.

With an hour of each day allocated to maintenance, the sales rep is entering data instead of making an extra sales call.

Instead of carrying out follow-up tasks with potential customers, sales reps are more concerned about checking off the right boxes and filling out the proper forms. 

Here are the 3 biggest problems we find most outside sales teams have with their CRM data:

1. 79% of CRM data entered by our field sales reps is inaccurate or incomplete

CRMs sell you on one thought: there’s information you’re leaving on the table and this tool

can help you leverage it to boost your revenue.

An effective CRM provides a central place to see sales numbers, pipeline opportunities, and sales activities.

It is supposed to be an investment that maximizes the productivity and effectiveness of your sales organization.

However, there’s a sneaky, unspoken truth here:

That investment doesn’t turn a profit if nobody uses it.

So these CRM vendors sell you on estimated revenue boosts based on an assumed adoption rate.

This means that if you really want your CRM investment to pay off then your job is two-fold: find a CRM that meets your organization’s data needs AND that your sales reps will use. 

If your reps don’t adopt the CRM, you don’t get your money’s worth and you don’t get the information that’s going to help you boost your team’s performance.

An effective CRM should store, organize, and make accessible the information you need to

build strong customer relationships.

No one can argue that better access to these details should make it easier for your reps to sell, and help the organization as a whole better reach its goals.

But if they’re not putting the info in, no one has anything to work with. 

No adoption = no information.

What’s worse, if your CRM makes it difficult to input that info easily, your sales reps might

put it off.

The longer they put it off, the more they will forget about the interaction.

When sales reps put off their CRM call notes until the end of the day they risk forgetting 64% of that vital info.

2. Your field sales reps are missing appointments and important follow-ups

The longer your sales reps go without getting customer or sale details into the CRM the more

likely they are to not report vital information.

They might even give you wrong information.

This has the devastating outcome of lowering their chance of landing sale and giving you even less information for your management needs.

3. Sales reps spend 88% of their time on non-revenue generating activities

Did you know that sales reps, on average, spend nearly 90 minutes of their workday dealing with their CRM?

Maybe they’re stopping after every meeting, busting out their laptop, and typing up all the details before the next sale.

Or maybe they leave it all to the end of their day (or week) in a game of catch-up.

That adds up. But just for illustration, let’s do the math:

With all that time, your sales reps face 2 choices:

1. Ignoring the CRM to stay in front of customers and use their time to focus on making sales instead.
2. Spending hours every day to take the time to enter good data into your CRM so you can actually get the insight you need to make strategic decisions.

Neither of these is a good choice. Both are losing propositions, and either way, you may not be getting a return on your investment.

So, what's the solution?

There’s a way to save that time, put that money to good use, and bring the best information

into your CRM.

Instead of putting your sales reps through an entire college semester of learning a new CRM, make sure their interactions with your CRM are quick, straightforward, and painless.

Here’s how you can do this as a manager:

Reduce their CRM engagements down to easy voice memos sent to our Voze system, which last 47 seconds on average.

These are enough for your sales reps to get the most important information recorded right after a sales meeting when it’s fresh in their mind.

Let Voze take on the administrative tasks that sales reps hate such as transcribing notes, setting appointments, creating reminders and to-do lists, updating contacts, and more all inside your system—freeing up your sales rep to keep selling.

Want to learn more?

Schedule a walkthrough to see how Voze can help you keep your reps focused on selling and leave the data entry to us.

Say goodbye to incomplete and incorrect sales notes.

Give your field reps a way to talk, not type their customer call data.

Keep your reps focused on selling, and leave the data entry to us.