The correlation between CRM efforts and selling

If the correlation between:
- The amount of time and effort spend by salesmen into the CRM
- The achieved sales level
is negative (the more time on the CRM – the less sales) then the company has a serious problem.

It means that salesmen are wasting their time by entering data into the CRM and have little or no return on their efforts. They perform administrative tasks instead of finding suspects, qualifying leads, following-up on prospects and closing deals.

This becomes especially apparent if the salesman with the highest revenue is neglecting all requirements imposed by management concerning the CRM as he spends no time on it. The CRM has really becomes questionable.

CRM administration vs selling

In the worst case the commission scheme includes a measurement of the administrative activities or tasks for the CRM.

As a sales manager you should have a metric indicating how much time salesmen are spending on the CRM compared to the time on leads and customers.

A CRM can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, allowing generating all possible sales and marketing management reports, that could just kill sales.

Sales people want to hunt for customers, nurture accounts and leads and sell.
They don’t want to do administrative tasks even if their commission scheme imposes CRM administration.

Revenue counts – not CRM administration and reports

The goal for any company is revenue that is generated by sales people. When sales people are busy with administration it is likely there will be less sales efforts and could even demotivate the salesmen.
Moreover if salesmen would have liked administration they would all have become accountants.

A company can have the best implemented CRM that generates the best sales and marketing management reports, but these won’t bring sales.

Does your commission scheme contains CRM administration as a parameter ?