A CRM should save you time. All too often, it’s the opposite: it becomes one more chore, fed by hand, squeezed between real tasks. And the data backs this up.
Less than 30% of time spent selling
According to Salesforce’s State of Sales, sales reps spend less than 30% of their time actually selling. The rest goes to non-selling activities: internal meetings, searching for information, and above all… data entry.
A Forrester activity study of more than 3,000 reps, cited by Salesforce, puts the time spent on CRM data entry alone at about 17% of the week. That’s nearly a full day per week, per person, just to feed the tool.
Meetings, hunting for information, data entry… less than a third of the time is truly spent selling.
The problem isn’t the CRM — it’s double entry
In most companies, the information already exists somewhere: in the inbox, in the website form, in the billing software. The problem is that someone has to manually re-type it from one system to another. That’s what we call double data entry.
And it carries a cost that goes well beyond lost time:
- Stale data: what isn’t entered right away is often forgotten
- Follow-ups that slip through the cracks: a client contacted too late is a missed opportunity
- Skewed forecasts: you can’t make good decisions on incomplete data
- Frustration: no one enjoys spending their days re-typing information
The fix: connect instead of re-typing
Integration means making your tools talk to each other, so information flows automatically, with no manual intervention. A few concrete examples:
- A new contact filled out on your website automatically creates a record in the CRM
- An email from a client automatically updates their file
- A paid invoice triggers a status update on the sales side
The rep no longer enters data: they sell. And the CRM, finally up to date, becomes what it always should have been — an asset, not a chore.
Where to start
There’s no need to connect everything at once. Identify the most frequent double entry in your day-to-day — often between email, the website and the CRM — and start there. The gains show up within weeks, and trust in your data comes back fast.
DramisInfo helps businesses connect their tools to eliminate double data entry and keep their data always up to date.
Sources
- Salesforce — State of Sales (sales statistics): salesforce.com
- Salesforce — New research reveals sales reps spend less than 30% of their time selling: salesforce.com