“So my goal with these seven productivity hacks I’m going to share with you is to get back a little bit more of your time every day by helping you be a little fast from the computer.” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 188
What is your favorite productivity hack?
Join the conversation below and check out all the links!
Jason Bay on LinkedIn
Blissful Prospecting
Links to app recommendations:
Paste
Freshstart
PowerTools
Skitch
Keyboard shortcuts:
Mac/PC
Google Chrome
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Jason Bay of Blissful Prospecting. Actually, this is more like 7 tips for the price of 1. Give a listen:
Jason Bay: One thing that we want to do as salespeople is really optimized and increase the amount of time that we spend in front of potential prospects selling and things that tend to get in the way of that or you know, meetings or we’re spending too much time on the computer looking for certain things. Or we might just be hunting down prospects and we don’t have efficient systems for going after them. So there are a lot of things that get in the way of us spending more time in front of prospects. And I don’t want to help you with all of those today, but what I do want to focus on is the time that you spend on your computer, you have sat next to a lot of salespeople in my career and in my observations, I noticed that they tend to waste anywhere between 30 and 60 minutes every day because they’re just too slow on the computer. So they can’t find out where that file’s located, that they need for that slide deck. They have certain things that they could be copying and pasting, but they handwrite every single time and there’s certain tasks they do that are inefficient and it just do it the same way over and over and over again. So my goal with these seven productivity hacks I’m going to share with you is to get back a little bit more of your time every day by helping you be a little fast from the computer. So make sure to check out the show notes. If it’s an app that I recommend, it will be linked-to in the show notes. So tip number one is using an app called Paste. This is only going to apply if you’re a Mac user, which I suspect is quite a bit of you that listened to this. But what I find with copying and pasting is there are certain phrases that I might respond to with our prospect that are very repeatable. It tends to be the same things over and over again. There are also certain like I have multiple scheduling links depending on what kind of meeting I’m scheduling and what Paste allows me to do is like I can actually bookmark all of this stuff within the app and then was a simple keyboard shortcut. I can open up these bookmarks and quickly paste them. So I don’t have to like rewrite the same things over again or hunt downlinks or things that I like to copy and paste. Tip number two is to Max out the speed on your mass and trackpad. This is a tip that Noah Kagan shares over at sumo me and one of the things that’s going to feel really weird when you do this. It’s going to feel like things are out of control on your computer but so you might incrementally work it up. But once I’ve gotten to the point where you maximize the mass on track speed, it’s not so slow for me to like, once I see what I want to click on, the amount of time it takes for me to actually click on it is a very, very short amount of time. I’m not limited by the speed of the trackpad or the mouse. Number three is use keyboard shortcuts. So again, this is going to be linked in the show notes because it’s going to depend on if you have a Mac or a PC. And if anything, I would recommend the shortcuts for Google chrome because all of you are probably using Google chrome, I would imagine. So with keyboard shortcuts, my goal is to spend at least amount of time and possible moving the mouse or trackpad to click on things. If I can do it on the keywords can be much than you haven’t been moved the mouse and click it. So switching between tabs, opening up new tabs, closing them, switching between windows just on your computer using keyboard shortcuts is gonna really, really increase the amount of speed that you have tasks switching. Number four is batch similar tasks together. One thing that I see a lot of reps doing is they only use their calendar to keep track of appointments and meetings. I mean, that’s one way to use a calendar. You obviously want to use it that way, but the big benefit you’re going to get from a calendar is also scheduling in advance and helping you prioritize things that are important versus urgent or that might be both. So for example, there might be things that you’re doing throughout the week such as writing proposals and the proposals might be something that, “hey, I need to do this within 24 hours.” But a lot of us, as soon as we get off a sales call, we immediately go into writing proposal and let’s say that’s a two o’clock in the afternoon. Well, that’s like prime time to be hitting the phones, so make sure that you like block off in advance. Maybe it’s two or three days a week when you’re sending out proposals. If it’s called blocks and you know that, hey, the afternoons are the best time to get hold of people and I tend to make these calls, I need to follow up with prospects that just haven’t heard back from or whatever. It may be. Block those times out in advance in your calendar so you don’t skip them. And so that you’re utilizing the best times of the day to make those calls. Number five is a Google Chrome extension called “Fresh Start.” So if you’re doing a particular task, and let’s say it requires you to have three to five different windows open at a time, or you can say, “Hey, I have a list building task and needs, LinkedIn sales navigator, lead IQ, and maybe some other stuff open, whatever you’re using, you can just click on a bookmark that you create for that.” And it’ll open up all those windows at once for you so you don’t have to open them individually. Number six is Power tools. Probably not going to apply if you’re a big company, but if you’re at a smaller company, you might be using Google sheets to sort a lot of your data and like, do you do it? It’s just a must-do. You gotta check it out, it’s going to save you a ton of time. And then number seven is an app called Skitch. So a lot of times we’re, you know, sending emails over to people and then asking them for feedback when it would be easier to just take a screenshot and then like point at what you want feedback on or to annotate it and like write something on it. So definitely would check out Skitch. So those are the tips. Hopefully one of those helps you save some time, but we would love to hear back from you. So let us know what your favorite productivity hack is by leaving a comment.
Scott Ingram: As Jason mentioned the show notes for this tip are pretty extensive and include a bunch of great links for you. To get to those details just click over to DailySales.Tips/188
Then make sure you’re subscribed to this podcast and come back tomorrow for another great sales tip from Andy Racic!