No – It's Not the Sellers, CRM, or Sales Leadership's Fault

When field sales breaks down, the blame game starts.

Sales leaders look at incomplete CRM data and think: "Son of a b****, why can't my reps just update their activities?!"

Reps stare at complex CRM screens and wonder: "Son of a b****, who designed this administrative nightmare?"

Operations teams review forecasts and mutter: "Son of a b****, how are we supposed to predict revenue with this incomplete picture?”

Everyone's frustrated, but here's the truth: nobody is at fault. We're watching good people struggle under a fundamentally inefficient system.

The Field Seller's Reality

Field sellers aren't lazy. Far from it.

They're road warriors fighting a constant tug-of-war to allocate their precious time between the prospect’s buying process and the company’s selling process, an impossible. Consider their reality:

• They average 12-14 hour workdays when traveling to meet prospects

• They handle 20+ face-to-face conversations on busy trade show days

• They interact with up to 10 different corporate applications on top of their own preferred note taking method

• They juggle relationship-building, active listening, and complex problem-solving simultaneously; nevermind the internal detective work required

• They're expected to remember every detail from every conversation

And all this while time and competing priorities work against them – we naturally forget 70% of information within 24 hours without reinforcement. (See: Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve)

When a rep fails to update the CRM after a long day of meetings, it's not laziness. It's cognitive overload colliding with an interface that demands perfect recall and 17+ clicks per interaction. They're not avoiding work; they're choosing between impossible admin or much-needed rest before tomorrow's meetings.

Necessary, but not sufficient

CRMs aren't villains either.

These systems were designed with the best intentions – to centralize customer data and provide visibility. But they were built for output (e.g, reporting), not for input (e.g.,capturing).

Salesforce, HubSpot, and others were developed during an era when desktop applications were the de-facto standard. Their interfaces presume:

• You are probably not using the app while in a fac-to-face meeting

• You have more time to update the CRM when not face-to-face

• You're working with a large screen and keyboard better suited for the busy user interface

For field sellers who rush between meetings or exhausted after trade shows, connecting to and interacting with the central CRM is an added chore because the mobile experience for those apps has long been an afterthought. The CRM becomes a repository designed for one workflow being force-fitted into a completely different reality.

In attempting to serve everyone's needs – sales, marketing, customer success, finance – these systems have become so complex that they serve the individual seller poorly.

Leadership's Impossible Position

And what about sales leadership? They're caught in the middle:

• They need accurate data to forecast, coach, and report upward

• They understand the burden CRM places on their teams

• They see the disconnect but lack tools to bridge it

• They watch their best sellers focus on customers while administrative details fall behind

When managers push for CRM adherence, it's not micromanagement – it's desperation for visibility. When they accept incomplete data, it's not complacency – it's compassion for overwhelmed teams.

Meanwhile, they're accountable for every missed forecast, every deal that slips through the cracks, and every executive question they can't answer because the data simply doesn't exist.

The System Itself Is Broken

The real culprit isn't people or software – it's a fundamental misalignment between how field sales actually works and how we've designed the tools to support it. 

We're forcing square pegs into round holes, then wondering why nothing fits properly.

Consider these realities:

• The Input Problem: Field sellers communicate through conversation, yet we force them to translate everything into typed forms

• The Timing Mismatch: The most valuable time to capture data is immediately after a conversation, but that's precisely when sellers have the least time to document

• The Context Challenge: Notes without context lose meaning, but capturing context is time-consuming

• The Competing Priorities: Every minute spent on admin is a minute not spent building customer relationships

The result? Organizations operate with partial information. Sellers burn out from administrative overhead. Leaders make decisions on incomplete data. Everyone loses, despite everyone's best efforts.

Moving Past “The Blame Game”

It's time to acknowledge a simple truth: the current system doesn't reflect how field sales actually works.

Instead of blaming sellers for poor CRM hygiene, or cursing CRMs for complexity, or questioning leadership's processes, we need to recognize that we've built tools that fight against human psychology and workflow realities.

The solution isn't more training, more discipline, or more processes.

It's reimagining how technology adapts to humans—not the other way around.

Because when you solve for the seller, everyone wins.