You're Spending Too Much Time Updating Salesforce (And Here Are 5 Reasons Why)

The average salesperson spends four hours per week updating his or her Salesforce CRM. However, this is hardly enough—the average salesperson only manages to complete 40 percent of sales updates. Automatic data entry will revolutionize that.

Diligent sales managers explain to their team, “If it’s not in Salesforce, it never happened.” In a world where sales managers need to be on top of their numbers, reps find themselves spending more and more time doing tedious updates to their CRM instead of spending time engaging and converting new customers. However, new automatic data entry technologies can help—reps can spend more time selling, while management can enjoy having the complete and updated numbers, always and almost in real time.

To analyze how much time people spend updating Salesforce, and the number of updates that they need to make, we analyzed data anonymously from hundreds of companies and thousands of sales reps that use Implisit. Implisit analyzed the sales reps’ emails and whether they were updated into the CRM. Then we analyzed the number of sales updates that were never updated in the CRM. Here are the results.

1. Reps spend more time updating their CRM than they spend on coffee breaks and Facebook

If you think that sales reps waste their time on coffee breaks and Facebook, you’re in for a surprise. The average sales rep spends almost four hours per week updating his or her CRM—wasting more time than on coffee breaks, Facebook, Twitter, and all other time wasters combined. Imagine how many more customer and prospects can be engaged with all of that spare time…

2. Tasks are updated most often

Nearly half of the Salesforce updates are Tasks, which take around two hours per rep per month to update in Salesforce. Leads take about 18 percent of rep’s weekly updates and Contacts around 17 percent. These Tasks can be easily updated automatically.

3. A large number of updates per week

The number of updates that reps have to make is staggering. The average sales rep needs to update over 60 records per day, or over 300 updates per week in order to keep their Salesforce CRM fully up to date. Obviously, as reps also need to spend time selling, it makes it hard for them to keep up.

4. Reps update only 40 percent of sales activities

The number of updates that a rep has to make in order to keep the CRM up-to-date makes it hard for reps to keep up. Implisit’s algorithm identified all of the updates that reps should have made based on their email communications. The result—less than 40 percent of changes are updated in Salesforce. Contacts, Tasks, and Accounts are updated most often while events are rarely updated.

5. Some reps must make over 500 updates per week

Reps with a lot of sales activity need to spend a lot of time updating Salesforce. Twenty-one percent of sales reps make over 500 updates per week to Salesforce. The majority make up to 200 updates.

Learn more insights in the infographic from Implisit below.

Sales reps should spend time selling. Spending four precious hours on Salesforce updates should not be a part of the job. Technology can eliminate the challenge of data entry. By mining the reps email account and connecting the reps’ email to Salesforce, smart algorithms can identify when events and meetings happen and update the right Lead, Contact, Account, and Opportunity. Automatic updates will both allow reps to spend more time engaging clients and will give management more accurate and complete data on their sales performance.

This article originally appeared on The RingLead Data Blog and has been republished with permission.
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Author: Jay Leonard

Jay is a UK-based cryptocurrency expert, specialising in fundamental analysis and medium to long term investments. Jay has a great deal of hands-on experience in analysing financial markets and performing technical analysis. Jay is currently focusing on the institutional adoption of cryptocurrency and what it means for the future of

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You’re Spending Too Much Time Updating Salesforce (And Here Are 5 Reasons Why)