Data is a critical pillar for any successful company: It drives decisions, optimizes strategies, and ensures teams work in alignment toward shared goals. Yet, while everyone appreciates the insights data provides, nobody wants to do the heavy lifting to ensure it’s accurate and complete—least of all salespeople. This reluctance creates tension, particularly between sales teams focused on closing deals and the broader organizational need for clean, actionable data.
Understanding this dynamic and addressing the root causes of friction is key to fostering a culture where data entry isn’t seen as a chore but as a cornerstone of success.
The Role of Data in Business Success
Data isn’t just a RevOps need—it’s a company-wide necessity. From pipeline forecasting to customer retention strategies, reliable data underpins every stage of the revenue cycle.
Take lead qualification, for example. Without accurate information about potential customers, it’s impossible to apply appropriate scoring and qualification frameworks like BANT or MEDDPICC effectively. This leads to inefficiencies, as sales teams waste time chasing low-value leads.
As Pranay Walia, Revenue Operations Consultant at Cremanski & Company observed, inconsistent definitions of a “qualified lead” between marketing and sales often result in a flood of bad leads that distract from high-potential opportunities. Clean, consistent data ensures that every lead passed to sales is worth pursuing.
Pipeline management tells a similar story. Companies rely on data like deal stages, close dates, and potential deal size to make accurate forecasts and set realistic goals. Yet, when sales teams neglect or fudge these details, the impact ripples through the organization. One of our customers described how he’s often had to manually adjust deal values and timelines to ensure forecasts are remotely accurate—a painstaking workaround caused by unreliable data entry.
Even the handoff from sales to customer success hinges on solid data. For customer success teams to deliver on promises made during the sales process, they need a full picture of the customer’s needs, expectations, and history. As Nicholas Reid who is leading Revenue Operations at Customer Alliance pointed out, incomplete or poorly documented handovers leave customer success teams scrambling, creating a rocky start that can lead to churn. Reid’s adoption of AI note-takers was a crucial step to capture critical details from sales calls and illustrates the importance of making data capture seamless.
Beyond operational necessities, data unlocks strategic insights that drive long-term growth. Nichlas Knudsen shared how analyzing website traffic data enabled him to better assess deal sizes and tailor outreach, proving that even simple data enrichment can empower sales teams to focus their efforts more effectively.
Sales: The Link Between Market and Company
Salespeople sit at the critical junction where a company meets its market. In every conversation, they translate the abstract concept of demand into rich, actionable context, culminating in the ultimate decision: yes or no. They understand customer pain points, preferences, and objections better than anyone else in the organization. This makes their insights invaluable—not just for closing deals but for informing strategy, optimizing processes, and aligning the company with real-world needs.
Because sales is the only team with such direct exposure, the responsibility of documenting this knowledge often falls on their shoulders. Everyone—Marketing, Customer Success, RevOps, Leadership—depends on them to provide accurate and detailed information. Yet, despite their unique position and the company’s reliance on their data, salespeople are often the least enthusiastic about data entry.
Why Sales Teams Resist Data Entry
Despite their critical role, salespeople are incentivized to focus on one thing: closing deals. Every moment spent on administrative tasks like updating CRM systems feels like a distraction from that mission. As Corina Maior from OpenCorporates puts it, sales teams want to be “out there” selling, not tethered to their desks doing paperwork. Add to that the cumbersome nature of many data-entry processes and the lack of immediate personal benefit, and it’s easy to see why resistance is so widespread.
Building a Culture That Values Data
How can companies overcome this resistance and foster a culture where data is treated as a shared responsibility? The answer lies in aligning incentives, simplifying processes, and emphasizing the value of data for everyone—not just the back-end teams.
Demonstrate the Value of Data
The first step is helping sales teams understand how data supports their success. Instead of framing data entry as a company requirement, show how it directly helps them close more deals. Clean data enables more precise lead targeting, personalized outreach, and tailored proposals. For example, when sales teams have access to enriched data about decision-makers, they can craft pitches that resonate—and win more often.
Simplify the Process
Making data entry easier is critical. Reduce mandatory CRM fields to the essentials and invest in tools that automate data capture, such as AI-driven systems that pull crucial information from sales calls and emails. As Nicholas Reid’s experience shows, automation not only saves time but also ensures data consistency, benefiting everyone involved.
Incentivize Engagement
Sometimes a little gamification or recognition can go a long way. Turn data entry into a challenge or competition, offering rewards for accuracy and timeliness. These incentives can shift the perception of data work from a burden to an opportunity to shine.
Build a Data-Driven Culture
Finally, companies need to foster a mindset where data isn’t seen as someone else’s responsibility but as a collective effort. Leadership plays a vital role here, setting the tone and reinforcing that accurate data benefits the entire organization. Regularly sharing success stories—such as how clean data led to better forecasting or higher win rates—can further drive home the importance of everyone’s contributions.
From Data Police to Strategic Partners
By addressing sales teams’ pain points and implementing thoughtful solutions, companies can transform their relationship with data. When salespeople see data entry as an enabler of their success rather than a distraction, they’re far more likely to engage with it willingly.
This cultural shift allows purposeful teams like RevOps to move away from being perceived as the “data police” and toward being valued strategic partners. It’s not about enforcing rules—it’s about empowering everyone to achieve their goals. And when data works for the entire company, the results speak for themselves.
Contrary to popular wisdom, messy CRM data can be a crucial element for efficient growth. We have spoken to numerous teams that achieved better prioritization and closed more deals by transforming emails, notes, transcripts, and other unstructured data into powerful insights—all with less manual effort. To learn more, check out this article on how to extract gold from unstructured data and turn chaos into clarity.