Here's the thing: sales reps spend just 28% of their time actually selling. The rest disappears into admin, data entry, and fighting software that's supposed to help them.
You've spent serious money on technology. CRM licenses, ERP implementation, order management systems, integrations. Six figures, maybe more.
And your sales reps? They're working out of spreadsheets, notebooks, and text messages to the warehouse.
You're paying twice: once for software nobody uses, and again in lost productivity from reps doing everything manually.
Why CRM Adoption Fails in Wholesale
Walk into most wholesale businesses and you'll find the same story.
The CRM everyone was forced to adopt. $50,000+ in licenses and implementation. Management wanted pipeline visibility. Reps got a clunky system that takes 15 clicks to log a call. So they don't log calls. Now the CRM is full of stale data, management still can't see the pipeline, and the reps resent being nagged about updating it.
The ERP that runs everything except sales. Finance loves it. Operations lives in it. But the sales module? It's a nightmare. Slow, confusing, desktop-only. Reps tried it for a month, gave up, and went back to emailing orders to the office.
The pricing tool that's already out of date. Someone built a master pricing spreadsheet. It was accurate once. Now there are fifteen versions floating around, each rep has their own copy, and nobody knows which one is current. Customers get quoted different prices depending on who they talk to.
The inventory system reps can't access. Stock levels exist somewhere in the ERP. But reps can't see them from the road. So they call the warehouse, interrupt someone's picking, and still get information that's hours old.
You bought these tools to make your team more productive. Instead, you've created an expensive obstacle course.
Why Sales Reps Don't Use CRM Software
Your reps aren't lazy or technophobic. They've made a rational decision: the spreadsheet is faster.
When the CRM takes 30 seconds to load and 2 minutes to log a simple call, the spreadsheet wins. When the ERP requires VPN access and a desktop computer to check a price, the spreadsheet wins. When the "official" system crashes on mobile, the spreadsheet wins.
Reps are paid to sell. Every minute spent fighting software is a minute not spent with customers. So they find workarounds:
- Personal spreadsheets with customer details, pricing notes, and order history
- Text messages to warehouse staff for stock checks
- Paper notebooks for order details they'll type up later (maybe)
- Email threads as their actual CRM—searchable, mobile-friendly, and doesn't require logging in
- Memory for pricing, because checking the system takes too long
These workarounds feel productive. The rep is moving fast, closing orders, keeping customers happy.
But the business is bleeding.
The Real Cost of Low CRM Adoption
When reps abandon your systems, you lose more than software ROI.
Customer knowledge walks out the door. That spreadsheet with five years of customer notes? It's on a rep's laptop. When they leave, it leaves with them. The next rep starts from zero.
Pricing becomes chaos. Without a single source of truth, every rep is quoting from their own version of reality. Margins erode. Customers learn to shop between your reps for the best price. Your pricing strategy exists only in theory.
You can't see your own business. Pipeline? A mystery. Sales activity? Guesswork. Customer health? You'll find out when they stop ordering. Management is flying blind while paying for systems that should provide visibility.
Errors compound. Orders written on paper get typed wrong. Stock promised from memory isn't actually available. Pricing quoted from an old spreadsheet doesn't match the invoice. Each error damages customer trust and creates rework for your team.
Scaling is impossible. You want to grow 30%? You'll need 30% more reps, because your systems don't help them work more efficiently. Each new rep inherits the same broken process and creates their own spreadsheet empire.
You're paying enterprise software prices for a business running on spreadsheets. Worst of both worlds.
How Much Time Do Sales Reps Spend on Admin?
Here's what nobody talks about: your reps are now your most expensive admin team.
A good sales rep costs $80,000-120,000 per year. You're paying them to build relationships, identify opportunities, and close deals.
Instead, they're spending 10-15 hours per week on admin:
- Re-keying orders from their notebook into whatever system the warehouse needs
- Manually checking stock through phone calls and emails
- Updating their spreadsheets with customer info, pricing, and order history
- Fixing errors caused by disconnected systems and manual processes
- Apologising to customers for mistakes that aren't their fault
That's $25,000-50,000 per rep per year spent on admin. A team of five reps? $125,000-250,000 annually—on tasks that shouldn't exist.
And because admin expands to fill available time, your reps never get to the high-value work. They're not visiting more customers. They're not developing new accounts. They're not upselling or cross-selling. They're too busy copying data between systems that should talk to each other.
You didn't hire expensive salespeople to do data entry. But that's what your systems have turned them into.
What Sales Productivity Actually Looks Like
The goal isn't to force reps back into bad software. It's to give them tools they'll actually want to use.
Fast beats feature-rich. A simple app that loads in 2 seconds beats an enterprise system that takes 30 seconds to open. Speed is the feature.
Mobile-first, not mobile-compatible. Reps are on the road. Their tools should be designed for a phone, not squeezed onto a smaller screen as an afterthought.
One place for everything. Customer history, pricing, stock levels, order entry—all in one app. No logging into four systems to answer one customer question.
Information that's actually current. Real-time stock. Pricing that updates when deals change. Customer data that syncs automatically. No more "let me check and get back to you."
Zero re-keying. Order captured on a phone flows straight to the warehouse. No paper, no re-typing, no "I'll do it when I'm back in the office." (This is the same problem that plagues Shopify B2B setups—data getting lost between systems.)
Admin that does itself. Call logged automatically when it ends. Visit report generated from location and duration. Customer record updated without the rep touching it.
When tools are this good, reps use them. Not because they're forced to—because it makes them better at their job.
The Spreadsheet Test for CRM Problems
Here's a simple way to know if your systems are working:
Ask your reps to show you their personal spreadsheets.
Every spreadsheet is a failure of your official systems. Every workaround is a feature request your software vendor ignored. Every notebook full of customer notes is data your business doesn't actually own.
If reps are maintaining their own systems alongside yours, you have a problem. And buying more software won't fix it—you'll just have more expensive shelfware and more elaborate workarounds.
Why Generic Sales Software Kills Productivity
You might be wondering why your expensive software doesn't work for sales teams.
CRMs are built for management, not reps. Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics—they're designed to give executives pipeline visibility and marketing teams lead data. The rep experience is an afterthought. Reps feel surveilled, not supported.
ERPs are built for finance and operations. The sales module exists because it had to, not because anyone designed it for how salespeople actually work. It's clunky, slow, and assumes you're sitting at a desk.
Generic tools serve no one well. Software built to work for every business is optimised for none. Your pricing rules, your customer relationships, your sales process—they're unique. Generic software forces you to adapt to its assumptions.
The result: you've paid for tools that make management happy and reps miserable. Management gets reports. Reps get friction. And everyone wonders why adoption is low.
How to Improve Sales Rep Productivity
Fixing this isn't about finding better off-the-shelf software. It's about building tools designed around how your reps actually sell.
That means:
Starting with rep workflows. What does a typical day look like? What information do they need, when do they need it, and how do they want to capture it? Build for that reality.
Killing the spreadsheet use cases. Every spreadsheet exists for a reason. Find those reasons and solve them properly. When the official tool is better than the workaround, reps will switch.
Integrating everything. Reps shouldn't be the human glue between your systems. Stock, pricing, customer data, orders—connected by default, updated in real-time, accessible from anywhere.
Prioritising speed. If it's not fast, it won't get used. Every second of loading time, every extra tap, every unnecessary field—it all adds up to abandonment.
Making admin invisible. The best admin is admin that doesn't exist. Automate everything that can be automated. Capture data as a byproduct of selling, not as a separate task.
The ROI of Sales Tools That Actually Work
When reps have tools they actually use, everything changes.
Your software investment starts paying off. Data flows into your systems automatically. Management gets the visibility they paid for. The CRM becomes useful because it's actually current.
Reps sell more. 10 hours per week recovered from admin is 500 hours per year. That's 200+ more customer visits, faster response times, more capacity for new business development.
Customers get better service. Accurate pricing, real-time stock information, orders confirmed instantly. No more "let me check and get back to you."
The business becomes scalable. When processes work, you can grow without proportionally growing headcount. New reps onboard faster because the systems actually help them.
Good reps stay. Salespeople want to sell. Give them tools that let them do their job, and they'll stop looking for somewhere better.
One client we worked with replaced their rep-facing systems with a single mobile app. Their existing CRM and ERP stayed in place—we just gave reps a front door that didn't suck. Within six months, CRM data quality improved 80%, rep admin time dropped by half, and sales grew 22%.
Not because reps worked harder. Because they stopped fighting software.
Questions to Ask Your Sales Team Monday Morning
Want to know if this is your problem? Ask your sales team:
- Show me your personal spreadsheets. What are you tracking outside our systems?
- What's the most frustrating part of your day?
- How often do you promise something and then have to call back to correct it?
- If our systems were perfect, what would be different?
- How much of your week is selling vs. admin?
Then sit with a rep for a day. Watch them work. Count the workarounds, the double-handling, the time spent waiting for software to respond.
The answers will tell you whether your expensive systems are an asset or an obstacle.
Ready to give your reps tools they'll actually use? Book a call with our team. We'll look at what's broken and show you what a system built for selling looks like.
