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Your PSA Isn’t Designed for Sales

If you’ve ever tried to manage a sales pipeline inside your PSA, you’re not alone. For most MSPs, it feels like a logical move. Why not use the platform you’re already paying for and seamlessly transition from prospects to onboarded customers? According to Robert Gillette, that thinking might be counterproductive, and setting back your sales efforts far more than you realize.

As a former MSP sales leader and the founder of MSP Dojo, Robert has had a front-row seat to what happens when MSPs try to stretch their PSA beyond its original purpose. And in most cases, he says, it doesn’t always end well.

Here are a few of the issues he’s witnessed, and why MSPs that are serious about sales should stop using their PSA as a CRM: 

It Treats Every Contact Like a Customer

“PSAs are great at tracking important information for important people. When you’re prospecting and doing sales, nobody’s important—because nobody’s a customer. So to take the world of people that might someday work with you and put them in the same database as people that are important makes no sense.”

Robert points out that this isn’t just a data hygiene issue, it’s a philosophical mismatch baked into the product itself. Most PSAs don’t recognize the difference between a cold lead and someone who’s your most important prospect.

“Most PSAs aren’t built to treat sales prospects differently based on engagement. If one prospect doesn’t answer and another one has a great call with you, the PSA isn’t designed to recognize that difference. You have to hack together a way to segment them manually, because to the PSA, everyone in the system is automatically treated like they matter. And the truth is, most of them don’t (yet).”

The Sales Team Makes It Worse

But even if you find a way to make it work, introducing your sales team to the PSA often leads to chaos. Not just for sales, but for everyone else who uses the system too. “If you put salespeople into your PSA, everything they do will make it worse. The sprawl and bloat that happens—the contact records that aren’t fully updated, deals that are created and then abandoned, opportunities that kick off automations your service desk now has to cancel—it just creates a mess. Your PSA becomes harder to manage, and less reliable for the people who actually need it.”

This is why Robert recommends creating separation between systems, especially when sales needs room to do sales things. “Having a separate sales CRM allows your team to move fast, make mistakes, get messy—and keep all that mess in a sandbox where it belongs. Sales is iterative. You don’t want that level of noise bleeding into your PSA, which is supposed to be a clean source of truth for your service team.”

Everyone Else Pays the Price

The sales mess doesn’t stay confined to the sales team, either. Everyone who touches the PSA ends up dealing with the fallout, especially when the system wasn’t designed to support sales workflows in the first place. As Gillette puts it, “There’s a cost to distraction. PSAs are built to serve the whole company, not just the sales team. So when a salesperson logs in, they’re hit with a ton of irrelevant fields, settings, and workflows.”

And while sales reps might be the ones creating the clutter, the operational side of the business ends up having to live in it. “Let’s not forget about the service team. They don’t need to see all the half-baked leads that your sales team is working on. Bloated contact records, dead-end deals, and half-written opportunities just make their lives harder. Everything the salesperson does in the PSA ends up making it worse for everyone else.”

You’ll Burn More Time Than You Save

Even the simplest tasks become frustrating. Reps spend more time updating records than actually selling—and eventually, they just stop keeping the data clean altogether. “I remember to this day: updating a contact in our PSA was at least seven times harder than doing it in HubSpot. And that’s something I had to do hundreds of times a week. When your system makes that task slow and clunky, data quality starts to fall off because people just stop doing it.”

The core issue, as Robert sees it, is that PSAs are designed for an entirely different stage of the customer journey. And these two stages couldn’t be more different. “This is the big disconnect: PSAs are built around servicing existing clients. CRMs are built around qualifying people. That means showing you the behaviors and signals that matter.”

It’s A Productivity Killer

That blindness trickles down into every part of the sales process. Instead of working smarter, reps are stuck repeating tasks manually, because the PSA doesn’t give them a better option for automation. “A good sales CRM will let you automate emails, schedule calls, and sequence your follow-ups with a click. Most PSAs don’t have anything close to that. You can sign up for HubSpot, connect it to your cell phone, and be auto-dialing in minutes. To do that in a PSA is a 10x lift—and you’ve got to build it out for everyone. That friction kills productivity.”

And without automation, every minute feels like a grind. As Robert explains, “They almost never have the type of automation or sequencing that helps a salesperson lever up their time. So they find themselves doing the same manual tasks over and over and over again, regardless of the importance of the person. That’s a huge drain on productivity—and a CRM should be fixing that, not causing it.”

There’s No Lead Scoring or Prioritization

Another big issue? Lead scoring (or the lack there-of). Robert points out that PSAs have no idea how prospects are interacting with your content, which is a massive blind spot. “Your PSA is probably not set up to track leads as they interact with your marketing materials, or to do lead scoring at all. They don’t care if a prospect reads an automated email about your service hours. But if you’re trying to qualify that lead, you really care. Because in sales, how someone interacts with your content tells you where they are in the journey—and the PSA isn’t designed to track and signal that behavior.”

Without insight into behavior, prioritization becomes guesswork—and that’s a huge missed opportunity. “A real CRM will surface those insights for you automatically with almost no configuration required. They’ll tell you who opened the email, who clicked the link, who replied. That’s the stuff that lets a salesperson prioritize and lever up their time.”

Training Becomes a Time Suck

It’s not just functionality that creates friction, it’s also the training. When new reps are onboarded into a PSA, it’s like handing them a Swiss Army knife when all they need is a screwdriver. “A PSA, by its very nature, is trying to serve everyone equally (sales, service, finance, ops). So when you onboard a salesperson into that environment, you’re air dropping them into a sea of irrelevance. There’s a ton of stuff in there that’s just noise to them. It’s a distraction at best, and a barrier to productivity at worst.”

And the longer it takes to onboard, the more time you waste getting them to the point of productivity. “Salespeople shouldn’t need a deep-dive PSA onboarding just to do their job. That’s not the best use of their time—or yours. The tools should match the task. If you put them in a proper CRM, they can start learning and executing within hours. But if you put them in your PSA, you’re setting them up for frustration. And frustrated reps don’t sell.”

It Costs You Twice

Then there’s the cost. On paper, adding a sales seat to your PSA might seem like a good value—but Robert says you’re actually paying a premium for a worse experience. “You’re going to spend somewhere between $100 and $200 to add a salesperson to your PSA—and remember, they’re going to make your PSA worse. Everything they do will clutter it: contact records that aren’t fully updated, deals that never close, automation triggers that get abandoned. You’re paying a premium to degrade the quality of your internal systems.”

Even if a CRM costs more per seat, it returns that value many times over in productivity and efficiency. “The cost comparison isn’t just per-seat pricing. It’s what that seat enables. A CRM helps you automate, prioritize, and move faster—so even if it costs more than your PSA, it earns its keep. With a PSA, you’re paying for access to a system that slows sales down and bloats your database. That’s not an investment. That’s just overhead.”

Integration Is a Distraction

And finally, there’s the issue of integration. Most MSPs want their CRM to sync perfectly with their PSA, but Robert suggests rethinking that entirely. “Everyone’s first instinct is always, ‘I want to integrate it.’ But the question isn’t when do I integrate—it’s how close can I get to a signed MSA before I even need to? The further you can move someone through the sales process without putting them in your PSA, the lower your cost of sales, and the more operationally mature your sales organization will be. That directly impacts your EBITDA. So it’s not really about when to push data—it’s about how far you can go before it even matters.”

The point is that integration should serve the sales process, not dictate it. In Robert’s view, sales should operate independently for as long as possible. “The temptation is always to ask, ‘Which CRM integrates with my PSA?’ But that’s the wrong question. The right question is, ‘Which CRM empowers my sales team to perform at a high level?’ Integration comes later, and honestly, it should only happen when other people in the company need visibility (like sales engineers or project managers). Until then, sales should live in its own world.”

In the end, Robert’s message is pretty clear. If you want sales to be a priority, then your tools need to reflect that. Your PSA may be the heart of your operations, but it was never meant to be the brain of your sales team. And the longer you keep trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, the more opportunities you’ll miss in the process.