Getting Your Sales Team Out of the CRM and Into the Field

The sixth edition of the State of Sales report, published by a major CRM vendor in 2024, contained a number that should alarm every sales leader: reps spend only 30% of their time actually selling. The remaining 70% goes to administrative tasks, CRM navigation, data entry, and internal meetings. For field sales teams in distribution—where order entry, route planning, and end-of-day data reconciliation pile on additional burdens—the selling percentage is often worse.

At a fully-loaded cost of $100,000 to $150,000 per field sales rep, that means $70,000 to $105,000 annually per rep is spent on work that generates zero customer value. For a team of ten, that's up to $1 million in capacity that could be revenue-generating.

Where the Time Actually Goes

Time audits of distribution sales teams consistently reveal the same breakdown. Data entry—entering customer information, logging activities, creating orders, updating opportunities—consumes 20–25% of the day. Much of it is duplicate entry, the same information going into multiple disconnected systems.

CRM navigation takes another 10–15%: searching for customer records, finding order history, locating contacts, clicking through screens. Administrative tasks like scheduling, expense reports, and meeting prep add 10–15% more. Internal meetings—pipeline reviews, forecasting sessions—account for another 10–15%.

What's left for customer meetings, calls, negotiations, and relationship building: 30–40% on a good day. The target should be flipping this ratio to 60% or more on selling.

The CRM Isn't the Enemy—Its Configuration Is

CRM systems aren't inherently time-wasters. They become time-wasters when configured for management reporting rather than sales enablement, optimized for data collection rather than deal acceleration, poorly integrated with other systems, overloaded with required fields, and designed for desktop when reps live on their phones.

Nearly 70% of sales reps reported feeling overwhelmed by the number of tools they use, according to the same 2024 State of Sales survey, with 9 out of 10 sales organizations planning to consolidate their tech stacks. The tool meant to help is actively slowing people down.

Seven Ways to Reclaim Selling Time

1. Audit required fields ruthlessly. Some CRM implementations require 15 or more fields to create a single contact. Each field adds friction. Go through every required field and ask: who uses this data? What decisions depend on it? Is anyone actually reviewing it? Any field that doesn't drive a clear action should become optional or be eliminated.

2. Make mobile the primary interface. "We have a mobile app" isn't the same as "our mobile experience works." For field sales, the phone is the primary device. Core tasks need to be completable in under 60 seconds with thumb-friendly design, offline capability for spotty coverage, and voice input for notes. If reps wait until they get home to update the CRM, the mobile experience has failed.

3. Automate activity logging. Recording that a call was made, an email was sent, or a meeting occurred should happen automatically through phone integration, email capture, calendar sync, and location-based check-ins. Reps should never type "called customer, discussed order." The system should already know.

4. Integrate order entry with CRM. In many distribution companies, reps enter orders in a separate system from their CRM—forcing context switches, duplicate customer lookups, and disconnected data. Integrated order entry means the customer record includes order history, new orders can be created from that record, and inventory availability is visible during the process.

5. Pre-populate everything the system already knows. Customer name, recent products ordered, pricing based on tier, default delivery address—all of this should auto-fill. The rep reviews and confirms rather than entering from scratch.

6. Batch administrative tasks. Some admin is unavoidable, but doing it in fragments throughout the day is far more expensive than batching. A 30-minute block at end of day for CRM updates beats scattered five-minute interruptions that break selling flow.

7. Simplify visit planning. Field reps often spend significant time planning routes and schedules. Map-based customer views, route optimization, customer priority scoring, and calendar integration should reduce tomorrow's planning to under five minutes.

Measuring Progress

Three metrics tell the story. First, task completion time: how long does it take to log an order, update a customer record, or plan a day's visits? Measure quarterly; these should decrease. Second, activity ratio: customer-facing hours per week and activities per day should increase as admin decreases. Third, rep sentiment: do reps say the CRM helps them sell, or slows them down?

Only 25% of B2B sales reps hit their quota in 2024, according to industry benchmarks tracked by SPOTIO. Reclaiming even half of the time currently lost to admin won't fix every quota miss, but it removes one of the largest controllable obstacles to rep performance.

Start with Observation

The most effective first step costs nothing: shadow a field rep for a full day. Don't audit—just observe. Watch where time goes. Notice the friction points. Ask what they wish was easier. That observation reveals more about where to focus than any report or survey, and it sends a clear signal that the priority is making their work easier, not just collecting their data.