Sales Data Nugget

How Many Sales Reps Regularly Update Salesforce?

Michaela Mendes

Head of Content & Strategy

Table of contents:

If you had to guess, how many sales reps on your team consistently update their opportunities in the CRM?

A quarter?

At least half?

Maybe even 75%?

Perhaps the more important question is: how can you tell if they’re updating their opportunities or not?

And how can you rely on the accuracy and completeness of the data?

For most companies, the answer is: they can’t.

And no data (or inaccurate data) means reps can’t manage their deals effectively. Leaders can’t manage their teams.

So we built a free tool called the CRM Health Grader that pulls back the curtain and tells you just how stale and incomplete your data is.

And based on 11.9 million anonymous Salesforce records analyzed since we launched the tool, we have some bad news about most sales reps.

They’re not updating the CRM very often…or at all.

Results: Over half of reps had no emails or meetings logged in the past two weeks.

Some Salesforce instances that were analyzed showed that 100% of active users had emails or meetings logged in the past two weeks — proving it’s possible to keep reps maintaining accurate data.

But they’re in the minority.

According to our analysis of active users in Salesforce:

51% have no emails logged in the past two weeks
53% have no meetings logged in the past two weeks

Why is this still a problem?

Reps not updating Salesforce? “Tale as old as time,” you’re probably thinking.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not still a thorn in the side of sales coaching, forecasting, and ultimately – revenue growth.

Here are three potential reasons you’re still fighting the CRM update battle:

#1: Reps don’t care.

Yep, I said it.

Your reps care about closing. They care about hitting their number. They care about improving their skills as sales professionals.

They don’t care if the CRM is neat and clean.

The only way to fix this problem is to coach your sales reps based on what’s in the CRM versus verbal updates or what they type into Slack.

Show them that you want to spend your deal review calls talking strategy, not getting status updates.

Show them you care as a leader.

#2: You’re asking for too much.

Think carefully about what you actually *want* sales reps to enter. Manual data entry is simply less reliable than automated data entry.

Is there an opportunity to automate away some of the everyday inputs and minimize the fields reps are responsible for?

#3: You’re depending on technology that’s letting you down.

You might have an activity capture solution, but it’s missing things. For example, it’s not capturing meetings that are happening via your video conference tools, or your sales engagement email integration isn’t syncing properly.

Tools that aren’t specialized for activity capture and writeback — often sold as add-ons — miss a lot and frequently break down. If you’re relying on this technology, you’re almost certainly missing data. Worse still, you won’t know why.

The bottom line? You don’t know what you can’t see. And unless you have a purpose-built solution, you won’t be able to see a lot.