How To Avoid Wasting Time in Sales

Are you a salesperson or sales manager who’s feeling frustrated, stressed, and overwhelmed? It’s common to feel that way when you’re pouring time and energy into work that doesn’t yield any results.

That often happens when the prospect you’re engaging turns out not to be a good fit, meaning that the product or service your company offers can’t actually help them solve their particular problem.

Prospects who are bad fits are a drain on your limited resources. The time you waste on them puts a strain on your other professional relationships, prevents you from doing important work, and can even cause you to lose your job or go out of business.

Using tech to avoid wasting time in sales

Luckily, there are ways to reduce the work and effort associated with qualifying, nurturing, reaching out to, and following up with prospects, so you can avoid wasting time on “no-decision” deals.

It all starts with identifying your ideal customer and mapping out your sales process. Once you’ve done that, you can leverage technology to qualify your leads and automate low-level tasks in your workflow.

When it comes to using technology to optimize your sales process, there are opportunities at every stage of the sales process.

If you manage a small sales team and are just starting to introduce new technology into your workplace, it’s better to start small.

Here are a few basic technological upgrades that can help free up time and boost productivity:

A self-selection tool on your website or a form for qualifying leads

Automation for eliminating manual tasks

Knowledge activation through text expansion for saving time and minimizing effort in lead nurturing

We’ll discuss them in more detail below.

Self-selection tool or detailed form

A self-selection tool enables prospects to select, from the products or services your company currently offers, what looks like the best solution for them.

An example of a company that uses a self-selection tool on its website is Carmax.com, a used vehicle retailer in the United States. On their homepage, you can select the types of cars you want, how much you can afford to pay per month, how much you can put as a down payment, and your credit score.

A self-selection tool. Source: CarMax.com

By enabling leads to pick their preferences on your website, you learn about their needs and their budget from the get-go while also providing them with an opportunity to opt out if they don’t see a solution for them.

Another way to collect information about a prospect before you invest time in building a relationship with them is through forms.

Consider adding a form to your website and asking detailed questions that help you qualify your leads. You can set up your form so that, if the lead answers No to any particular question, they are immediately disqualified.

Automation

When you map your sales process, patterns will become clear. Within them, you’ll find a number of repeatable tasks that you can automate.

If the concept of automation sounds intimidating, know that automation is no longer restricted to operating complex systems and heavy machinery.

Nowadays, automation is a normal part of many people’s personal and work lives, thanks to online workflows and automation software like Zapier.

Using Zapier, you can build an automation even if you have no experience or coding skills. Zapier also has thousands of ready-to-use automations, or Zap templates, that you can simply activate to use. You can find a list of Zapier integrations relevant to sales here.

Knowledge activation

Salespeople often have to ask the same types of questions and send the same kinds of messages throughout the buyer’s journey.

To reduce the amount of time and effort you put into crafting these messages, you can use templates or go a step further and use a knowledge activation platform.

A knowledge activation software like TextExpander saves you time but gives you more agility and flexibility than templates. In TextExpander, you can store not just messages, but also one-line phrases and details like codes, phone numbers, and URLs, and access them with a few quick keystrokes.

For each fragment of information you save, you assign an abbreviation. Then, when you want that information to appear where you are typing—whether that’s Gmail, LinkedIn, or your CRM—all you have to do is type the abbreviation.

The main advantage of using TextExpander is that it saves you so much time. By using just a couple of keystrokes to pull up messages, you can answer frequently asked questions in a flash, speed up your outreach, and spend less time managing your CRM.

The other advantage is that you can create a repository of tested-and-approved messaging that you can share with the entire team so that everyone is effective and consistent.

Sales reps love TextExpander

Thousands of sales reps use TextExpander to be more efficient at their jobs every day. Here’s what they’ve said about TextExpander in business software review website G2:

The shorthand features allow me to save time and [improve] accuracy on all emails and documents.”
– User in commercial real estate

“The best thing about this product is that you can easily send emails or statements in 2 taps.”
– User in wholesale

“Helps save time by not having to type out long industry-specific verbiage repetitively. We are constantly re-using stocked sentences and terms and TextExpander helps mitigate time loss in doing so. I have multiple words saved as well as full snippets to insert.
– Manager

Try TextExpander today

To qualify and nurture leads more efficiently, you need to rely on technology. Start with a basic self-selection tool or form on your website. Then, streamline your processes using automation and speed up your communications with TextExpander.

TextExpander is the most popular knowledge activation software, with features that enable you to reach out to more prospects while keeping communication relevant and personal.