EXECUTIVE TL;DR

Salespeople don’t hate CRM systems.

They hate unnecessary effort.

When CRM systems create friction in the sales workflow, adoption drops — regardless of how technically well implemented the system may be.

Understanding adoption problems requires starting with the sales team, not the technology.

One of the most common explanations for CRM adoption problems is this:

“Salespeople just don’t like using CRM.”

It’s a convenient narrative.

But in my experience, it’s rarely true.

Salespeople don’t dislike CRM.

They dislike friction.

The Workshop That Changed the Conversation

During a recent engagement, I spent two days working with three sales reps whose organisation was struggling with Salesforce adoption.

Before touching the system itself, we started with a simple exercise.

I asked them to list everything that frustrated them about Salesforce.

What emerged was revealing.

There were no catastrophic issues.

No broken features.

No obvious technical failures.

Instead, there were a collection of small workflow frustrations that made everyday tasks slightly harder than they needed to be.

And those small frustrations were enough to discourage consistent usage.

The Compounding Effect of Small Frictions

Individually, each friction point seemed minor.

A field that was hard to find.

Information buried too far down the page.

Extra steps required to send information to other teams.

But collectively they created a system that felt inconvenient.

And when a tool feels inconvenient, people naturally start working around it.

That’s when data quality begins to degrade.

CRM Adoption Is a Design Problem

CRM adoption is rarely about enforcing behaviour.

It’s about designing systems that align with how salespeople already operate.

When the CRM supports the sales workflow, adoption improves naturally.

When it disrupts the workflow, even the best systems struggle.

Improving CRM adoption doesn’t start with new features.

It starts with understanding where friction exists in the sales process.

By aligning the system with the realities of how sales teams work, organisations can dramatically improve adoption without needing large transformation projects.