Challenges and Lessons Learned in Ensuring Sales Follow-Up and Process Adherence for HRMS SMB Sales Teams

One of the problems we spent significant time & effort towards in my last role was missed follow-ups and process adherence. We sold an HRMS product to SMB customers (manufacturing businesses, hospitality, etc.) and had a large sales team (~300 reps). This is what our follow-up automations (simplified workflow) looked like. What still failed? 1. Tasks bloated over time. We had to manually clean a large number of irrelevant tasks every month. The process we built to address missed follow-ups created its own maintenance problem, and we had to spend time each month cleaning up irrelevant tasks. 2. Reps were always optimising between new leads and follow-ups. We had a higher lead volume, which we shared with reps every day, and that meant they ended up prioritising which old leads to call. 3. Reps still maintained their individual spreadsheets to track larger deals. For Advanced stages, they could rely on the CRM & deal pipelines, but for early-stage conversations, Reps sometimes starred good leads or kept track of them in a spreadsheet. What did we miss in getting this to succeed?