Ensuring CRM Adoption for Your Field Reps: A RevOps Challenge

Guest blog by Gabe Naviasky

For companies that have field sales representatives, a major pain point is consistently encountered: keeping their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Pipedrive, consistently updated with accurate and detailed customer information.

The reason why field reps often struggle with CRM adoption is because they are on the road instead of behind the computer. This issue creates significant downstream challenges, such as data inaccuracies, missed follow-ups, and revenue loss. Additionally, a lack of oversight leaves managers in the dark, leading to strategic errors and the inability to coach reps effectively.

Clari, the leading revenue forecasting platform, indicated that 10% of annual revenue is lost from incomplete or inaccurate CRM data.

Why Field Reps Face CRM Challenges

The nature of field reps' roles, spending the majority of their time on the move, sets them apart from inside sales reps. While inside sales reps update the CRM throughout the day, field reps often rely on notes in a notebook or on their phones, neglecting direct CRM input. This presents challenges, consuming a significant amount of time at the end of the day and making it difficult to recall the specific details of all the meetings throughout the day.

Imagine if you are an outside sales rep for a residential solar company. You spend all day knocking on doors to see if they’d be interested in transitioning to solar. On some days these reps can knock on 100+ doors without stopping at a computer, so they must record each conversation as it happens. What we have seen as the most effective way to overcome this challenge is using Voice to CRM technology, so reps can simply speak into their phone to auto generate notes and next steps into the CRM using AI.

The Significance of CRM Adoption

Strong CRM adoption empowers teams to make data-driven decisions. A regularly updated CRM instills trust in the data, ensuring reliable decision-making. Failure to maintain an up-to-date CRM leads to task oversights, missed meetings, invoices not being sent, and unrecorded notes, ultimately leading to revenue leak. Additionally, sales managers face challenges coaching their team without insight into meeting outcomes and deal progression.

Key Reasons for Strong CRM Adoption:

1. Data-driven decisions: A regularly updated CRM instills trust in the data, improving decision-making.
2. Task Management: Ensures sales reps stay on top of their tasks, and notes and prevent follow-ups, meetings, and contracts from slipping through the cracks.
3. Coaching Opportunities: Provides sales managers with insights for effective coaching, helping them to guide reps based on deal details.
4. Succession Planning: If a rep leaves the company, having great CRM compliance and adoption preserves contacts, accounts, and opportunity data so that a new rep can seamlessly pick up where the last rep left off.
5. Revenue Leak: There is a higher chance of revenue leak when no documentation in a CRM exists. Revenue leak is the amount of money that a business has or could have earned but hasn't collected.

How to Drive CRM Adoption:

1. Managerial Accountability: Implement the principle of "Inspect what you Expect" to hold reps accountable for CRM adoption.
2. Demonstrate Value: Illustrate the benefits for individual reps by showcasing data proving that those who actively use the CRM close deals more efficiently and for larger amounts.
3. Easy to Use: Simplify CRM usage by leveraging Voice AI tools like Leadbeam.ai, enabling field reps to create workflows and update the CRM effortlessly while on the move. Voice input is 5x faster than typing, enhancing efficiency.

Conclusion

To mitigate revenue leak, field reps must maintain CRM compliance. Streamlining the process is crucial, ensuring reps can effortlessly update the CRM even while on the move. One way to improve rep productivity is to make sure your reps are staying up to date in their CRM and on their tasks.

Author Bio:
Gabe Naviasky

Gabe Naviasky is a RevOps enthusiast with a passion to help sales reps get better. He is the Co-Founder of Leadbeam, which helps sales reps adopt their CRM, while they are in the field using Voice & Image AI. He is recognized as a Top Sales Operations Voice on LinkedIn and has spoken at The Sales Enablement Collective RevOps Summit. Before starting Leadbeam, he lead a revenue team at FitGrid, a seed stage fitness technology. Connect with Gabe on LinkedIn to follow more of his content.