7 data-backed reasons your sales reps are missing quota
As a sales manager, you’ve heard every excuse in the book.
“The leads are bad.”
“We’re missing features.”
“Our product is too expensive.”
But the real reasons your team continues to miss attainable revenue goals may surprise you.
It’s not that they’re lazy, they just have too much to do.
In fact, of the 600 sales professionals who responded to The Sales Happiness Index, 77% reported working more hours now than before the pandemic, yet 41% of that time isn’t spent selling.
Here’s what’s actually keeping your reps from closing (and how to fix it):
They lose up to 60% of work-hours to task switching
Your reps might have all the expensive gadgets, but according to our recent study, only 62% of team sales tools get used, leading to endless context switching.
Researchers at University of California Irvine found that on average, office workers are interrupted or switch tasks every three minutes and five seconds, wasting up to 60% of work-hours.
The Solution: Bring your siloed tools, team members, and deal data into one view.
You can finally embed repeatable call questions, Salesforce fields, daily tasks, and team members directly into your sales notes without ever leaving Dooly. Bonus: it all syncs back to the mothership — Salesforce.
They don’t have a structured sales process
Any task you do once or more a week needs a process. That includes managing your calendar, Slack messages, to-do lists, call notes, making sales templates for common internal and customer meetings, and playbooks for every objection — pricing, competitor battlecards, etc.
Without a dedicated space to do all this, the tools will start controlling your rep’s day and distracting them from customers, instead of aiding them through the sales cycle.
The Solution: Dooly helps ramp reps faster with a library of sales call and internal handoff templates and AI-triggered battlecards.
Using Dooly’s Salesforce and Slack integrations, reps can automatically sync all meeting data (notes, Salesforce fields, contacts, and more). They can also loop in any team member via Slack — all without leaving Dooly.
“Dooly is the motor that drives our Sales Process. As a manager, I can do pipeline reviews MUCH more effectively.”
Chris Koch, Senior Sales Manager @ Procurify
They’re updating the CRM
Before implementing Dooly, we found the average rep spent 5+ hours a week updating Salesforce.
If you ask Apollo Team Lead and Senior account manager Byron Sierra-Mattos, that’s criminal.
In fact, he refused to do it until it threatened his paycheck.
“Five hours a week. It’s a potential of 10 demos… even at 20% close rate, two new deals per week, eight per month, times 40 reps… holy sh*t, that’s 320 new opportunities.”
Byron Sierra-Mattos, Team Lead & Senior Account Manager at Apollo
The Solution: Byron — along with top SaaS companies like Asana, Figma, and Intercom — use Dooly to get up to 7.5+ hours back per week in unnecessary CRM gruntwork and inefficient communication. As an added bonus, he says having all his notes in chronological order and automatically synced to the opportunity has improved his follow-up game.
They’re stuck in internal meetings
55% of reps cited internal meetings as a top activity keeping them from selling. While pipeline reviews should focus on strategic planning around open opportunities, poor CRM adoption forces managers to spend more triaging than coaching in 1:1s with reps.
Even when reps don’t need tech support, they spend up to an hour per week organizing their pipeline in a presentable way for their internal meetings. And as a manager, you spend too much of the 1:1 getting caught up on data entered minutes before.
The Solution: Cut down internal meeting time by making data more visible. Use Dooly custom pipeline views to create shareable dashboards — opps closing this month, opps in a certain stage, opps that require your attention.
“Dooly is a godsend to my AEs saving them up to 5 hours a week between streamlining pre-call prep, post-call notes, and general Salesforce pipeline updating. ”
Mark Eckstein, Director of Enablement at Bizzabo
They have to dig for content
According to Forbes, the single biggest time-waster for salespeople is searching for prospect-requested content.
While the right sales enablement content can help move deals forward, it has the opposite effect when you spend hours searching for it.
The Solution: Dooly playbooks use AI to immediately serve up objection-handling content based on trigger words used on the call.
They’re going after the wrong deals
… Because they don’t have enough data to understand what the “right” deals look like.
Before using Dooly, former Formstack sales manager Austin Hudspeth, told us he realized lucrative opportunities were slipping through the cracks “at a good clip.”
“I would’ve never known that before Dooly, because those deals would have never been seen or known in the system,” Hudspeth explained. “I can see our average deal size. I can look into how it’s changed.”
The Solution: Use Dooly to easily navigate your team’s deal data and identify hot opportunities.
“Dooly is covering my a** because it shows me where the breakdown is happening,” explained former Formstack sales manager Austin Hudspeth.
“Now it’s consolidated. It’s fewer tabs, it’s consolidated into, essentially, just Dooly… It helps a lot with us seeing what’s relevant… and helping us prioritize and organize it.” Adam Goldberg, enterprise account executive at Formstack.
“Now it’s consolidated. It’s fewer tabs, it’s consolidated into, essentially, just Dooly… It helps a lot with us seeing what’s relevant… and helping us prioritize and organize it.”
Adam Goldberg, enterprise account executive @ Formstack
The bottom line
In short, your reps don’t have the time or data to close deals and hit quota. And in sales, time is money.
Salespeople we surveyed estimated non-revenue generating activities cost companies 38% of revenue every year. Want to close the revenue gap? Talk to a sales process expert at Dooly.
