Manual data entry kills CRM adoption rates
Your sales team’s CRM adoption is low and manual data entry is to blame.
Why? For starters, the average sales rep spends an average of six hours a week on manual data entry.
Yes, you read that correctly. Nearly 15% of the 40-hour work week is spent typing notes and numbers into a clunky CRM.
Tedious is an understatement. Switching among reports, tabs, and spreadsheets is a nightmare. And for what? Low-quality data with limited insights?
Sellers get frustrated and stop putting in data as often. Eventually, they abandon the CRM altogether. And we don’t blame them.
Manual data entry, poor CRM data quality, low CRM adoption rates, and time wasted. Combine these, and you get what we call revenue leak.
Revenue leak represents sales you think you have earned but have yet to officially close and put on your books. It can be tough to spot, but the results are damaging:
- For every $1 lost to revenue leak, a company loses $9 in equity value (NYU Stern)
- 14.9% of a company’s revenue is lost due to revenue leak (Clari Labs)
- $2.1 trillion in economic value is destroyed each year by revenue leak (BCG)
Revenue leak is a pretty nasty outcome for low CRM adoption. It’ll make you wonder why you ever implemented your CRM in the first place. The good news is, you’re not alone.
According to CSO Insights, fewer than 37% of sales reps actually use their company’s CRM system. Even bleaker: according to Redspire, nearly 50% of projects fail due to slow user adoption.
So how can you solve the problem of low CRM adoption due to manual data entry? Let’s discuss.
Automated data entry solves the #1 CRM adoption challenge
On the surface, eliminating manual data entry for CRM is “easy.” The solution to any manual process is to automate it, and data entry is no different.
But like all automation strategies, what sounds easy isn’t always the case. For example, building an in-house tool that allows CRM data entry to be automated is difficult and time-consuming.
Thankfully, there’s a better way: use a Revenue Platform that offers CRM automation. Clari, for example, has best-in-class CRM automation: Autocapture.
With Clari’s Autocapture, sales reps can easily capture all activity data that they typically log into CRM manually. As a Clari user myself, I know how easy this makes a rep’s workflow.
As a sales rep for the past ten years, I spent countless hours searching for data and manually entering it into our CRM every week. It was a tedious task that everyone in sales dreaded, but we all assumed it was inevitable. Then I discovered Clari.
I stopped pulling numbers, combining spreadsheets, and chasing down old emails. With Clari, I immediately got better CRM data faster—all without lifting a finger.
So how does Clari work?
Clari harvests activity metadata and external participants from calendar invites, email threads, and more. Then it uses that data to create new contacts and activities within your CRM. It automatically fills in contact information and associates contacts with their respective opportunities.
The result?
With CRM automation, teams finally have accurate and complete CRM data (populated with actual contact and activity data). Sales reps, managers, leaders, and operations teams can finally focus on more strategic tasks.
But that’s not all.
By solving their issues associated with manual data entry, they’re now one step closer to stopping revenue leak.
Other benefits of CRM automation: Give sellers back time and increase CRM data quality
Beyond eliminating the pain of manual data entry, CRM automation has two primary benefits:
- Sales reps save time. Reps spend much less time on manual CRM data entry and more time selling.
- CRM data quality increases. The robust data unlocks the potential for insights (warning: CRM alone is not insightful enough). Sales reps start to see the full power of their CRM, causing adoption to increase and usage to grow.
But the main benefit? Increased CRM adoption by the sales team, operations team, and finance.
Collaboration increases when all revenue-critical teams adopt CRM. So does efficiency.
There are fewer excuses for low CRM adoption rates
Odds are, your sales team’s low CRM adoption and usage is because of tedious and painful manual data entry.
By automating your data capture and collection process, your reps get time back, you get better data in your CRM, you stop the revenue leak, and everyone gets a productivity boost.
Oh, and you’re one step closer to “running revenue” like a pro.
Ready to increase your CRM adoption rates? See how Clari can help.
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