Finnish sales teams share the same struggles
A salesperson sits in front of an open CRM window after a meeting, wondering what to log. A sales leader sits in a pipeline review, giving a forecast they do not fully believe in themselves. A new salesperson tries to figure out how their colleague makes it look so easy, but no one can explain it. There are ten different systems in use, and five of them need to be updated manually.
These problems are different faces of the same phenomenon. Revial's data from encounters with 460 sales professionals shows that Finnish B2B sales systematically breaks down in five areas. Each of them has become so deeply normalized as part of daily work that it is no longer questioned. And every single one of them is fixable.
The salesperson is not selling, they are proving they sell
On average, a salesperson spends 34 percent of their working time on actual selling. The rest goes to CRM entries, email threads, reports, building proposals manually and pre-meeting preparation that starts from scratch every time. Manual work and inefficiency collected 238 mentions as an everyday challenge in the study.
This is a figure every sales leader knows in some form. Yet it has become normalized as part of the basic reality of a sales structure turned upside down. Systems do not communicate with each other, so every piece of information is entered manually into each system separately. The CRM is filled because management expects it, not because it helps the salesperson. As a result, 91 percent of CRM data is incomplete or inaccurate, and the salesperson spends over five hours per week on work they get no benefit from themselves.
The sales process exists but is not in use
Sales process challenges collected 594 mentions in the study. This challenge is different in nature, harder to spot. Manual work shows up in calendars and logs, but the absence of a sales process only becomes visible when you look back and wonder why so few salespeople hit their targets.
Only 37 percent of companies have a formal, collectively adopted sales process in place. The rest operate in a situation where each salesperson builds their own version of how deals are done. In many organizations, a process exists on paper: it was presented at a kickoff and saved to a shared folder. After that, it has stayed there living its own life, disconnected from the daily reality it was supposed to guide.
Only 38 percent of buyers honestly tell the salesperson why they did not choose that vendor. Over 60 percent of the reasons behind lost deals remain guesswork because the information is never asked for or recorded.
Sales data is everywhere and at the same time nowhere
Data management and analytics collected 594 mentions, sharing the top spot with sales process quality. Most organizations have a CRM, analytics tools and reporting templates, meaning they are not short on data. The problem is that it is not being used. And unanalyzed data is as good as no data at all. When fragmented, it reveals nothing about the full picture of a customer relationship or deal probability.
The consequence is concrete. 93 percent of sales leaders cannot predict their quarterly result with any precision, even on the final stretch. They lead based on the mood of weekly meetings, salespeople's own assessments and their best guesses. The uncertainty and end-of-quarter rush is not inevitable. It is solvable, even if it has already become accepted as normal.
20 percent of salespeople deliver 80 percent of the results. Why can't the rest get there?
Sales skills and coaching collected 356 mentions and is the third most common challenge in the study. Every sales team has the same structure, where a few top performers produce the majority of results and the rest try to figure out how. This is often treated as a law of nature, which it is not. It is the consequence of never having broken down the best performers' methods and transferred them to others.
The best salesperson hears the hesitation behind the question before it is spoken aloud. They know how to structure a meeting so that the customer themselves arrives at the conclusion the salesperson was aiming for. They ask more than they tell, listen more than they speak. This is not a personality trait. It is a learned structure that has developed through repetition and feedback. The problem is that this structure lives inside their head. The organization trains at kickoffs and quarterly meetings, and 84 percent of that content is forgotten within three months. Information transfers, but skill does not.
The structure of sales forces salespeople to serve technology
Technology adoption as a sales challenge collected 356 mentions in the study. Many organizations have already invested in this, but technology has been acquired to solve one problem at a time. Each acquisition is justified by a different problem it aims to solve. As a result, the whole has become a structure that burdens the salesperson more than it supports them.
The average sales team uses ten or more separate tools. Only 25 percent of salespeople feel they get significant value from them in their daily work. The CRM is a visibility tool for management, and the task of filling it has been outsourced to the salesperson. The analytics solution tells you what happened, not why or what should be done differently.
The data reveals a structural problem spanning the entire sales process
When you look at all five challenges together, a pattern emerges that repeats regardless of organization type. The salesperson spends their time on administration because the process is fragmented. The process is fragmented because no one can see how it is executed. No one can see because data does not accumulate structurally. Data does not accumulate because technology is designed for reporting, not for selling. And because skills live inside individual salespeople's heads rather than in any shared structure, every new salesperson starts from scratch.
This is a cycle. It does not spin fast or visibly. It turns quietly, quarter after quarter, until the end of the year arrives and everyone wonders why growth did not materialize even though the team was good, the product was good and market conditions were reasonable. The answer lies in the structure of sales, where salespeople are forced to operate on the terms of their systems.
How to fix the structure of Finnish sales
Fixing the structure does not mean doing everything at once. It means changing one thing whose impact is felt across the board. When interactions are recorded automatically, manual logging disappears. When logging disappears, the CRM fills up reliably. When the CRM fills up reliably, leadership gets data to lead with. When leadership sees what happens in interactions, they can give feedback based on reality rather than interpretation. When feedback is based on reality, skills begin to transfer. When skills transfer, the performance gap narrows.
Every part of this structure depends on one thing. Making the customer interaction visible. When that happens, what your best salesperson already does stops being their personal secret and becomes the organization's shared asset.
The data from 460 sales professionals shows where Finnish B2B sales breaks down. It does not show that the breakdown is inevitable.
Want to see how Revial solves these challenges in your organization too? Book a demo.
Read the in-depth parts of the blog series here:
Pain points in sales: why your sales process is working against you
Pain points in sales: manual work
Pain points in sales: data management and analytics
Pain points in sales: skills and coaching
Pain points in sales: technology is not the solution if it takes more than it gives
About the data: Revial collected data from encounters and surveys with 460 sales professionals in 2025 and 2026. Company and individual names are not disclosed. This article summarizes the key findings from the five-part Pain Points in Sales series.