Technology was supposed to free up time, but in many organizations it adds to the administrative burden
This is the fifth and final part of Revial's research series, where we examine the five biggest challenges in Finnish sales based on data from 460 sales professionals. Throughout this blog series, we have discussed the burden of manual work, the inefficiency of sales processes, data management challenges and the uneven distribution of skills across teams. The final challenge is at once the most concrete and the most puzzling, because it is the only one organizations may have already invested the most in. And misguided investments in technology are expensive these days.
Technology adoption collected 238 mentions as an organizational challenge. Less or more surprisingly, the issue is not a lack of technology. The challenge is rather that there is too much of it, it does not communicate across systems and the salesperson spends more time managing tools than serving the customer. The investment that was meant to free up time has instead increased the administrative burden.
The salesperson has a calendar, CRM, email, proposal tool and video conferencing software, and none of them know about each other
A meeting is scheduled in the calendar. Background research is done separately. Notes are entered manually into the CRM. The proposal is built in a separate tool. Follow-up is sent from email. Every transition from one system to the next is a moment where information fragments and disappears and time goes to anything but selling.
This is not a hypothetical example. It is demonstrably the daily reality of most sales teams. Systems have been acquired to solve one problem at a time, and each of them has solved that problem reasonably well. However, the whole has become a structure that burdens the salesperson more than it supports them. The technology in use is layered, not integrated.
Why more technology is not the answer
When sales does not grow as expected, the accepted reaction is to look for a new tool to fix a single assumed bottleneck. When analytics do not work, a better analytics solution is purchased. When proposals do not progress, a CPQ is acquired. When salespeople do not log data in the CRM, a CRM that is easier to log into is purchased. Each acquisition is justified on its own merits. Yet the whole does not improve, because the problem is not in any single tool.
The problem is that technology has been built for reporting, not for the salesperson. The CRM is a visibility tool for management, and the task of filling it has been outsourced to the salesperson. The proposal tool speeds up documentation, but the salesperson still builds every proposal from scratch. The analytics solution tells you what happened, not why or what should be done differently. The salesperson is the input end of these systems, not the beneficiary.
Technology that serves the salesperson looks different
Throughout this series, we have walked through five challenges that are not separate from one another. Manual work consumes time, the absence of process breaks the structure, fragmented data blinds leadership and skills accumulate with the few. And the technology that was acquired to solve all of these has added administrative burden instead of removing it. These five challenges feed each other, which is why a single solution to one challenge is no longer enough for any organization pursuing growth.
Technology earns its place in a sales team when the salesperson does not notice they are using it, but they notice the difference if it were taken away. The meeting is recorded, the CRM is updated and leadership sees the situation. The salesperson prepares for the next interaction with knowledge rather than guesswork. No one is reminded to log anything. Nothing depends on one person's memory. Technology is then a structural part of sales, not an extra layer on top of it.
You only notice the best technology when it is missing
The data from 460 sales professionals tells the same story in five different ways. The five challenges of Finnish sales are different manifestations of the same structure: an organization that has grown without a shared backbone on which every interaction, every deal and every salesperson can rely.
Your best salesperson already knows what works. The problem is that no one else does. Creating structure does not mean adding bureaucracy. It means making what works visible, repeatable and scalable. A structural change through one single tool, which at best your competitors are already using.
This was the final part of Revial's five-part research series. Want to see how these five challenges are solved in your organization? Book a demo.