The #1 reason reps work outside your sales stack (and what to do about it)

As sales organizations continue to ramp up their investment in technology- with the average budget approaching $6,700/rep/year — one of the biggest challenges for sales ops teams is getting consistent use of the tools they are buying.

One sales ops leader we work with framed this problem best:

“It’s not having gaps in the data that’s the problem- it’s not knowing where the gaps are.”

If the goal of sales technology is to help drive top line growth, why is adoption a problem for so many sales teams?

Adverse Incentives

At the heart of the problem is a big gap in incentives between the front-line and upper management. Managers use CRM technology like Salesforce and Zendesk to aggregate and analyze large data sets to help guide strategic decisions. This process can take anywhere from months to years to yield results. In contrast, front-line reps are incentivized to hit short-term goals like monthly or quarterly quotas. For them, time is money and any task that eats into that time, however beneficial to the organization, bares a very high cost.

And really it’s hard (if not unfair) to blame them. If you were three days from the end of the quarter and didn’t have 100% faith in the phone/email tool your company provides, would you use it for that critical closing touch point?

The power gap (how much do managers really have?)

When describing the dynamic between managers and reps, one of our favorite sales leaders put it best:

“A players do whatever they want, B players do whatever the A players do, and C players try to game any system you put in place.”

While managers are constantly try to understand what their highest and lowest performing reps are doing differently from average performers, these are the audiences least likely to generate accurate data for managers. For the best reps, forcing them to adopt a process they don’t like can affect job satisfaction/retention, as well as potentially lower their output. For the worst reps, getting them to increasing tansparency is often at the bottom of their list of priorities.

The solution

So how can sales ops teams close this gap?

1. Make ‘simplicity’ your #1 requirement. Solutions like Truly Wireless and Yesware are designed to make activity logging in the CRM passive (minimal input required from rep) and almost impossible for the rep to mess up. Time savings for rep = data for manager. Simple. If there is any additional work required on the rep’s part to achieve your desired outcome, you data set is guaranteed to be incomplete.
2. Make transparency a part of your team’s culture. Programs involving managerial/team coaching show that captured data like call recordings and activity reports are less about ‘audit trails’ and more about sharing best practices across the organization.

At Truly, we’ve made it our mission to to provide a new breed of communications software that sets a new standard in reliability and usability for front-line reps, generating powerful conversation data sets managers previously couldnt’ access. If you want to get more insight into how your team communicates with the outside world, we’d love to connect with you.