Let’s get one thing clear: efficiency is the key to success in sales. In a working environment that involves constantly juggling multiple tasks on a daily basis, being able to extract every drop of value from every single action is often the difference-maker between a good sales team and a great one.
But from prospecting to closing deals, from maintaining customer relationships and staying on top of targets, there’s just so much going on that time can get sucked up without anybody even realizing it.
And if you’re not actively trying to save as much time as you can, you might well find your sales reps are consistently underperforming across the board. After all, every minute or hour that can be freed up is a minute or an hour that can be devoted to a higher-value activity.
That’s why we’ve decided to come up with ten time-saving hacks that busy sales reps can use to save time during the course of their day-to-day professional activities. From technological tools to psychological tricks, this list will help sales reps in any industry maximize their productivity and drive their teams toward sustainable, long-lasting sales success.
Without further ado, let’s dive in!
1. Email Templates
We’ll start the list of time-saving sales hacks for busy reps with a true game-changer — email templates. As every sales manager knows, emails are a foundational element of any well-oiled sales process. But they’re often boring to write, they need to be personalized for every prospect, and they need to vary hugely depending on where the deal is in the pipeline.
It’s a major time sink for reps who are already juggling a handful of tasks, and it’s easy for manual error to slip into the picture and potentially undo hours of hard work.
That’s where templates come in. By creating a library of email templates for common scenarios, such as initial outreach, follow-up messages, and thank-you notes, sales reps can quickly personalize and send emails without having to start from scratch every time.
The key to saving the most amount of time with email templates lies in ensuring they’re customizable enough to be tailored to individual prospects, without losing the consistent professional tone that sets your organization apart from its competitors.
2. Automated Reminders
By far one of the most effective ways to save time is using automated reminders. Today’s modern business environment is more fast-paced and hyper-connected than ever, and sales reps in the field have an overwhelming number of tasks they need to keep up with.
From follow-ups and meeting appointments to proposal deadlines and product demos, it’s never been easier to forget a task and unknowingly hamper the entire deal you’ve been working on. That’s where automated reminders come in. By setting them up directly from your CRM system, you can ensure that nothing important slips through the cracks for your reps.
Luckily, noCRM makes it possible to set reminders for just about any task you can think of. Thanks to the high customizability of the platform, your reps can set up their reminders the way that makes the most sense for their deals. And once they know they’ll never miss another follow-up, they can devote that time saved towards more strategic tasks, knowing noCRM will be there for them with instant alerts when it’s time to take action.
3. Sales Automation Tools
We really are in the age of automation, with AI and machine-learning technology dominating the headlines of every forward-looking news outlet. And while these space-age software packages are capable of producing decent work on their own, their real value comes in being able to automate away repetitive tasks and save human workers time that can be spent on more challenging, rewarding activities.
With so many manual tasks in a standard sales workflow, the selling arena is the perfect opportunity for automation disruption. From dull, manual tasks like data entry and lead scoring to more advanced email marketing campaigns, sales automation tools offer a huge number of ways to streamline your workflow.
By automating as many processes as possible, sales reps can focus on higher-value activities like building relationships and pushing their deals toward the finish line.
4. VoIP Software
It might feel like a surprising entry on this list, but Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) software is an absolute game-changer for sales reps who make a lot of calls and want to save as much time as possible. You’re probably wondering how this could be the case. After all, you still have to make calls, right? How much time could VoIP really save?
Unlike traditional phone systems, VoIP’s ability to make and receive calls over the Internet results in higher call quality. This in turn cuts down on unforced errors arising from unreliable calls or crossed wires, which does contribute somewhat to saving time. But VoIP’s real potential for streamlining workflows doesn’t come from the calling itself — it’s all the admin behind the calls.
Thanks to the advanced features on offer, such as call recording and voicemail to email functionality, VoIP makes logging the outcomes of your calls and taking notes for further follow-ups a breeze.
And if you can integrate it with your CRM system, it becomes even more straightforward to track and record your communications, manage relationships, nurture leads, and ultimately close more deals. noCRM offers seamless integration with a number of VoIP software programs, helping the reps on your team to cut out unnecessary busy work and spend more time selling. You can learn more about VoIP integrations via noCRM by clicking here.
5. Calendar Management Software
Every experienced sales rep knows the horror of a chaotic calendar. There’s no better way to ensure you’re going to perform suboptimally than being confused by the appointments, deals, and meetings you’ve got coming up.
And if things are really bad, you might find yourself spending valuable time trying to sort the problem out — which means you won’t be spending those minutes and hours on actually selling.
Fortunately, calendar management software is here to help. Tools like Calendly, Google Calendar, and Outlook make it easy to schedule and manage appointments more efficiently.
By setting meetings with a few clicks, sending automatic reminders to participants, and avoiding conflicts or double-bookings, busy sales reps can essentially hack their own schedule, eliminating unnecessary hassle and stress and ensuring they never miss another crucial meeting.
Plus, with most calendar software packages offering CRM integrations, you can keep everything organized in one convenient digital space.
6. Sales Intelligence Tools
Sales intelligence is one of the cornerstones to a successful, revenue-generating pipeline. After all, it’s impossible to target the right prospects and make informed, data-driven decisions if you don’t have laser-focused insight into who you’re actually selling to.
However, the work required to effectively meet your sales intelligence needs is significant, often requiring multiple steps before you get to a workable level of insight.
But by leveraging sales intelligence tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and InsideView, busy reps can dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to build up the intel they need. With highly detailed information about prospect purchasing behaviors, technology stacks, and recent business activities, reps can identify potential opportunities and tailor their outreach efforts accordingly, faster than ever.
These tools can also help automate the data-gathering process, cutting out even more busy work for time-poor sales professionals.
7. Task Management Apps
Not everybody finds it easy to keep track of daily tasks, especially when juggling multiple deals and customer interactions within a single pipeline. But failing to keep on top of all your necessary duties is a sure-fire way to underperform. So what’s the solution?
One possible answer is using task management apps. Trello, Asana, Todoist, and other similar programs help salespeople organize their tasks, set and adjust priorities, and stay on top of their to-do’s, without all the time-wasting confusion of manual lists. And for when you’d like to keep track of tasks directly within our CRM, without having to juggle countless programs, noCRM makes it possible, thanks to the ability to create activity and revenue-based sales goals. You can easily track the performance of all your reps and filter through goals based on time filters for deeper insights. For more information on how noCRM’s sales goals help you boost productivity and growth, click here.
8. Time Blocking
Time blocking is a productivity technique that involves scheduling specific blocks of time for different tasks throughout the day. Instead of multitasking or handling tasks sporadically, reps can create dedicated time slots for activities like prospecting, follow-up calls, meetings, and administrative work.
Grouping similar tasks together and focusing on one activity at a time doesn’t just save time, either — it also significantly cuts down on the mental fatigue associated with task-switching.
The technique is at its most effective when prioritization is included, so reps should start by identifying their highest-priority tasks, estimating how long they’ll take, and then building out a daily or weekly schedule from there. Adhering to that schedule will reduce distraction, improve efficiency, and, perhaps most importantly, save serious amounts of unnecessarily wasted time.
9. Batch Processing Tasks
Batch processing is an advanced psychological hack popular with high-performing CEOs and other C-level executives — but that doesn’t mean sales reps can’t reap the rewards as well.
At its most basic, it involves grouping similar tasks together and completing them in a single session, rather than spreading them out throughout the day. By eliminating a large portion of the time spent on context switching, this technique can increase overall efficiency.
One example of batch processing might involve setting aside specific times during the day to handle all email communications, rather than replying to each one as it comes in. It’ll be easier to get into the specific flow state associated with that task, and as a result, the overall outcomes will improve significantly.
The approach can be applied to making phone calls, updating records, preparing proposals, and just about any other daily sales task that eats away at everybody’s time.
10. Effective Meeting Practices
Meetings can be a huge time drain if not managed effectively. And although it probably sounds like a super basic element of the sales process, you’d be amazed by just how many sales teams don’t spend enough time considering their meeting practices and examining them for areas of potential improvement.
Making the most of meeting time means adopting practices that encourage efficiency and productivity for all participants. This starts before the meeting even takes place, with clear agendas set and distributed beforehand to guide the discussion. Ideally, these agendas should include the topics to be discussed and the objectives to be achieved, clearly outlined with actionable language.
Another great tip for boosting meeting productivity is using a time limit. If you only have fifteen minutes to talk about a subject, you’ll be much more efficient in your communication than if you had an hour and a half. And as long as you’re not skipping over any important details, there really are no downsides to getting to the point quicker.
We’ve all sat in unnecessary meetings that went on far too long. To some degree, they’re probably unavoidable — things don’t always go according to plan, after all. But if your sales team can reduce how often they occur, you’ll stand a great chance at saving time and boosting morale across all your reps.
Time has always been a crucial resource in the world of sales, but in today’s modern business environment, it’s more important than ever. With fast-paced sales teams going head-to-head every minute of every working day, you really can’t afford to lose a single unnecessary minute. Luckily, by implementing the ten time-saving hacks we’ve outlined above, busy sales reps can streamline their workflows, efficiency, and focus on what they do best – building relationships and closing deals.
noCRM is a lightweight, streamlined CRM that’s ideal for SDRs and BDRs who can’t afford to waste any time. That’s why we offer automated reminders, VoIP integrations, and a host of other features, all in a single, intuitive package. If you’d like to claw back more of your time and squeeze the most productivity out of your sales team, consider trying out noCRM today — it might just be the game-changer you’ve been searching for.
