8 Reasons Why Your CRM is Killing Your Sales Productivity (and what good might look like)

CRM’s are meant to help sales people. After all, nobody sets out to design software that makes your job harder. And yet many CRMs do exactly that. In fact, according to a recent study by Merkle Group Inc.,

Up to 63% of all CRM initiatives fail.

What’s going on? Why don’t CRMs actually help sales reps do their jobs better?

Here are the top eight reasons why your CRM is killing your sales productivity (and what good might look like):

1. Your CRM Actually Creates More Work

You invested heavily into your CRM because you were hoping it would lead to more sales.

But, as a recent Sales Execution Trends report shows:

Only 41% of a sales rep’s time is spent actually selling.

The rest of their time? Besides travelling, coordinating tasks and activities, and struggling to find the right sales content and resources, a pretty good chunk is probably spent manually updating your CRM.

What if you could have a complete overview of your business and still reduce admin and increase the productivity of your reps?  How much time would that open up for reps to focus back on selling?

2. Your CRM is a Pain to Use

Had a great meeting with a prospect? Great! Open up your CRM, create a new event, enter all of your client’s information, type all of your meeting notes into the right field, and BOOM!, it’s logged.

Need to schedule a follow-up? No problem, just create a task from the task tab, re-enter all of your client’s information, don’t forget to click to send them a notification email, and make that call!

Have an amazing opportunity in your pipeline that’s going to need a demo with all seven different decision-makers and your CTO?

I think you see where this is going.

What if your sales app was intuitive and easy-to-use and offered sales-centric workflows?  Would that get your reps to actually update your CRM?

3. It Doesn’t Integrate With Your Everyday Apps

Your phone knows who your contacts are, your calendar knows who you’re meeting with and when, and most of your client’s info is already on LinkedIn.

Why should you spend time re-entering it all into your CRM?

It’s a waste of time, and if you’re CRM isn’t playing nice with the apps you use on a daily basis, it should.

What if your software was smart enough to integrate with your most commonly used apps, and kept you from having to enter data that’s already somewhere else?  How convenient would that be?

4. You Need to Go Outside of Your CRM for Custom Reports

Need a custom report that shows you the opportunities from your new product within the last six months?

You’ve got three options:

The only thing slower would be doing it by hand.

1. Navigate through a maze of ‘custom’ fields in your CRM, only to realize it’s like trying to assemble a Ducati with a screwdriver.
2. Ask your overloaded CRM administrator to create it for you, then wait a few days while he reprograms the CRM to generate your report.
3. Get fed up with options 1 and 2, and just create an Excel spreadsheet from scratch.

What if it only took a few clicks to generate a report in your CRM, using the data you’ve already entered? How much effort would that save you?

5. You Can’t Find What You Need When You Need it

How about finding the latest corporate presentation for an upcoming sales call?

Just look for it in the CRM… where it’s drifting among thousands of other uncategorized files.

It’ll only take a minute to find. Really.

If your reps end up scanning dozens of emails or sending out an email blast to your entire organization because they can’t find what they need in the CRM, you know there’s gotta be another way.

What if you had pre-filtered information at your fingertips, and could find peer-rated, tailored information in seconds?  How much time would that free up? 

6. Your CRM Has a Task Manager, But You Still End Up Emailing Everyone

You’ve assigned an important follow-up to one of your reps using your CRM, and you want to know how it went. So you open up your Tasks tab to check the progress and see… that you assigned a task a week ago, and nothing else.

What if your CRM let your team update the status of any task, in real-time? And let you always view those tasks in relation to your deals? How many phone calls and emails could you avoid?

7. The Mobile Version Sucks (or, There’s No Mobile Version!)

Just met someone at a conference who might be interested in your solution? Might as well write his contact info down on a cocktail napkin, because you’ll have to wait to go back to the office to update your CRM.

What if your CRM was always on the road with you, and was just as functional on a phone or tablet as it is on the web, even if you were offline? How much would you be able to accomplish then?

8. Your CRM Was Designed for Management & The Back Office, Not Sales

How many fields do your sales reps need to fill out in your CRM in order for you to have an overview? And how much time do reps spend entering and re-entering their activities, just so that the back office can generate the reports they need?

And does any of that bring sales reps any closer to closing a deal?

Not one bit.

So it’s no wonder that, according to selligy.com, over 20% of deals aren’t entered into the CRM until after the deal is closed, meaning your forecasts might as well be drawn with fluffy clouds and rainbows around them.

What if your CRM not only made life easier for sales reps, it actually helped close deals more effectively? And what if that meant that sales reps actually used their CRM, and management ended up with all of the information it needed?

What kind of sales environment would that create?