It’s crazy that the majority of sales professionals refuse to use their company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software or CRM.
Over the last 30 years, corporates in the united states have spent over $650 billion dollars on enterprise software. Despite this,
63% of sales reps refuse to use their CRM.
40% of sales reps still use spreadsheets to track activity.
Companies have enormous investment tied up in their CRMs, email systems and other software but they will never generate the return they need until sales professionals embrace these tools.
So why do sales reps push back on enterprise software?
Sales people are well-aware that they are the only employees that are required to report on all of their activity each day. They are directed to enter contacts, visit reports, notes about who they connected with, who they are calling on, where they’ve been and where they are going, how much they expect to sell and much more.
No other function is required to do this.
No-one asks marketing to account for every minute of their day. Finance doesn’t suffer from this oversight. Sales people feel that with this oversight comes an unspoken threat that if they don’t perform they will be replaced.
All of the current CRM analytics focus far more on oversight of a reps performance that functions that add value to the rep. This also is a clear attempt to intimidate them into performing.
Add to this the issue that CRM offers them almost no advantage. No payback. They simply see no benefit to themselves from adopting their company’s CRM. It is heavily dependent on them entering data. Keeping data up to date. All of these factors take time away from sales professionals from selling. It holds them back. Data entry is cited as the major gripe sales people have.
The current crop of CRMs also have a user design that suits finance, IT and marketers with dashboards, reports, tables of data and crowded screens but the reality is that for those of us who focus all day on people to people interactions; building quality buyer-seller relationships, we simply are not interested in screens of data.
Many pieces of software are not mobile friendly. Built and designed for laptops they fail to realize that most of the sales teams are mobile warriors. Phone screens people are a must.
It’s no surprise that they push back!
