You’re halfway through the forecast meeting and somebody eventually says what everyone has been thinking: “We need another rep.” The quarter is behind plan, pipeline isn’t covering the gap, a couple of deals everyone expected to close have moved, and adding another salesperson feels like the most obvious way to create more capacity. Maybe it is. But before you add another salary, territory, quota and CRM licence, I’d want an answer to a different question: where is the selling time you’re already paying for going?
There is a big difference between needing more salespeople and needing more selling capacity, yet the two are often treated as the same problem. If the people you already employ are spending a meaningful part of every week doing work that doesn’t help them find, progress or close business, hiring another salesperson doesn’t necessarily solve anything. You may simply be putting another expensive person into a system that consumes too much of the time you hired them to spend selling.
Start by looking at what a salesperson actually does all day
Forget the dashboards for a moment and follow one salesperson through an ordinary week. Watch what happens from the time they start preparing for a customer meeting until the opportunity eventually closes. They search for account information, update opportunities, chase approvals, answer internal messages, prepare forecasts, enter notes, update Salesforce and, in plenty of organisations, update another spreadsheet because somebody still wants the numbers presented differently from the CRM.
None of those tasks looks outrageous in isolation, which is precisely why they tend to survive. Five minutes here, ten minutes there, another field to complete, another piece of information to enter because somebody decided three years ago that it should be mandatory. The salesperson stays busy, management sees activity, and nobody notices how much potential customer-facing time has slowly disappeared into the machinery around selling.
Take a deliberately conservative example. If you have ten sellers and each of them loses just 30 minutes a day to avoidable administration, duplicate entry, searching for information and unnecessary internal process, that is 25 hours every week. More than three full working days of sales capacity have disappeared from a ten-person team before you have even started looking at what the managers are doing.
And that matters because salesperson number eleven is going to inherit exactly the same process.
Your managers may be paying the same tax
Listen carefully during the next forecast meeting. How much of the conversation is genuinely about what needs to happen next to win a deal, and how much is spent trying to establish what is actually going on? If the manager is repeatedly asking where the opportunity really stands, who has been engaged, what the customer actually said, why the close date moved again, whether procurement is involved and whether the deal genuinely deserves to be called commit, then something important is happening.
The salesperson has already spent time putting information into the system, yet the manager is spending additional time reconstructing the story behind that information. Now two expensive people are involved in maintaining and interpreting the same opportunity, and the forecast meeting starts becoming an information-gathering exercise instead of a management conversation about how to win.
That is why I wouldn’t look at this purely as a CRM problem. It is a sales-capacity problem. If Salesforce supposedly contains the information management needs but managers still have to chase salespeople for the answer every week, I’d want to understand why before adding more headcount to the organisation.
The unofficial sales system will usually tell you where to look
One of the easiest ways to find friction inside a sales organisation is to find the unofficial system people have built around the official one. There is usually a spreadsheet somewhere, a manager’s private forecast, a separate notes document, an important Slack thread, or a dashboard someone created themselves because the standard reporting never quite answered the question they needed answered.
It is easy to look at these workarounds and conclude that you have an adoption problem. Sometimes you do. Salespeople can resist processes and technology just like anyone else, but when capable people repeatedly work around a system, I wouldn’t dismiss the behaviour until I understood what it was telling me. A workaround is often evidence that somewhere between the way the process was designed and the way the work actually happens, something no longer fits.
Maybe the CRM asks for information at the wrong point in the sales cycle. Maybe a mandatory field exists because somebody once wanted a report that nobody looks at anymore. Maybe the manager needs information the system does not surface easily, or the salesperson is entering essentially the same information in two different places. Telling people to “use Salesforce properly” might improve compliance, but it does nothing to remove the reason the workaround appeared in the first place.
There’s another question worth asking: what does the salesperson get back?
Most CRM systems are very good at taking information from salespeople and making it available to everybody else. Management gets visibility, finance gets reporting, operations gets data and leadership gets dashboards. All of that is useful, but if the salesperson’s side of the bargain amounts to “put more information in so everybody else can inspect what you’re doing,” it shouldn’t be surprising when adoption starts feeling like compliance.
A useful sales system should return value to the person doing the selling. It should help them prepare faster, reduce repetitive work, surface important information, make follow-up easier, show where an opportunity is getting stuck and remove tasks that should never have required manual effort in the first place. When salespeople can see that the system makes their job easier rather than simply creating another layer of administration, the adoption conversation changes considerably.
That is why I think many CRM programmes begin with the wrong question. They start with, “How do we get the sales team to use Salesforce properly?” A better question might be, “How do we make Salesforce useful enough that the sales team has a reason to use it properly?” Those questions sound similar, but they lead to very different decisions.
AI gives us a chance to remove work, but it can also automate nonsense
The same issue is becoming more important as businesses start putting AI into sales. There is enormous potential here because salespeople still spend far too much time collecting, entering, summarising and moving information between systems. Used well, AI can remove large amounts of work that should never have required a seller’s attention.
The problem is that automation does not magically turn a bad process into a good one. If a salesperson is performing a pointless administrative task and you build an AI agent that completes that task in three seconds instead of three minutes, you have certainly improved the speed of the process, but you haven’t answered the more important question: why are we doing this at all?
That is why I would find the friction before deciding what to automate. Work out which information genuinely matters, where it should come from, who needs it, when they need it and what decision it is supposed to support. Once you understand that, AI becomes extremely useful because you can remove work intelligently rather than simply adding another technology layer to a process nobody has stopped long enough to question.
Now the headcount decision starts to look different
After you have done all of this, you may still arrive at exactly the same conclusion you started with: the business needs another salesperson. If so, hire them. The difference is that you are now adding somebody to a sales environment that has been examined for unnecessary work, duplicate processes, poor information flow and avoidable friction.
That is a much better place from which to make a headcount decision. You are no longer assuming that more people automatically creates proportionately more capacity. You know how the existing capacity is being used, you know what is being wasted, and you have a much better idea of what another salesperson will actually add.
Before approving the next sales hire, I would spend a week looking closely at five things: the work reps perform more than once, information managers still have to chase manually, processes experienced sellers routinely work around, data nobody can explain why the business collects, and repetitive activities that either should be automated or should never have existed in the first place.
Then ask the original question again: do we genuinely need another salesperson, or do we need to give the salespeople we already have more time to sell?
The answer may still be “hire,” and there is nothing wrong with that. But before spending more money on headcount, CRM licences, another sales technology platform or the next AI tool, it makes sense to understand whether the revenue system you already have is making the best use of what you already pay for.
Make the revenue system work harder before asking the sales team to work harder.