5 Productivity Hacks for Successful Sales Managers

Need to help to become more efficient at work? Do you have enough time to get all your tasks done? Here are 5 productivity hacks all successful sales managers should consider:

 

1. Turn Off Alerts

It’s extremely easy to be diverted from your important tasks by phone alerts from social media channels, emails, text messages and the like. It is a wise idea to shut those notifications off while you are at work and focus on the critical tasks at hand. Your productivity will skyrocket once you tell your phone you are not interested in what it has to display.

 

2. Drink Water

The majority of us do not drink water as much as we should be. Our bodies prosper on drinking water – it gives us more energy, keeps us hydrated and gives us an excuse to get up and take a break from the chair we’ve been sitting on all day.

 

3. Make the Most of Lost Hours

Talking on the phone while driving is illegal in many parts of the world, so we would never suggest this to anyone. What we do suggest is to download industry-related podcasts on to a tablet or phone and listen to them on the way to work and on the way back home. Waiting at the doctor’s office for your turn? Maybe catch up on industry news and blogs.

 

4. Allot times for emails

Checking and responding to email is one of the biggest time-sucks. If you don’t believe us, try to monitor your email usage for one whole day and add up all the minutes you spent on this task. A new study by McKinsey & Company found that workers spend 28% of their day reading and answering emails; the second most time consuming activity in a work day. Resist the urge to answer every ping you get. Set times throughout the day in which you will check emails and resolve issues.

 

5. Have a Day Plan in Place

If you’ve ever come home at the end of the day with that sinking feeling of “I didn’t get anything done today,” this productivity tip is for you. It’s easy to get bogged down in the cycle of responding to situations, people, and other emergencies. But rather than letting others dictate the course of your day, have a plan (task management) in place for proactively completing projects and tasks.

Everyone is of course different in the way that they set up their day. We’ve shared  with you an infographic that explores the hacks LinkedIn Influencers use to save time and increase their daily productivity.

Productivity Hacks from LinkedIn Influencers

 

Source: LinkedIn

Download your CRM Software free trial today. We’ll help you become proactive and productive in no time.

DiggThis

The Mysterious Mind of a Sales Manager

What makes a great sales manager great? Maybe you can identify one when you meet them or perhaps when you get the chance to work with one. The formula of what it takes to get a lead or transaction can be a bit “gray” for the majority of us. In fact, the accomplishments of sales managers can be almost always impossible to pinpoint. What happens in their minds when they approach a prospect and how do they go from lead to sale? Success is not that daunting, if you understand how the mind of a sales manager works.

We would like to share with you an infographic that delves into the mysterious mind of a sales manager. MindMaster.com has identified 9 qualities that distinguish the best ones from the rest very well:

 

Vital-Sales-Training-Tips

One of the most overlooked aspects of sales management is the CRM Software tool.  In today’s globalizing society and ultra-competitive business world, it’s not enough to have your sales process mapped out on paper.  You also need to ensure it’s being recorded in a way that is easy to follow and allows everyone to buy into. Your sales process will be of most value when it’s used to measure and track opportunities in a measurable ($$$) manner. Without such insights, you will be dependent on guesswork.

To help with your sales management, you need access to a powerful tool that will enable you to measure and maintain your sales pipeline management and the individual sales reps that use it. You need a tool that will allow you to quickly calculate such things as Number of Leads, The Average Cost Per Conversion and Drop Off/Win Rate. That’s InfoFlo.

 

About InfoFlo

InfoFlo – is a central management system specifically designed to combat one of the biggest technical challenges facing any professional organization, how to efficiently organize, archive, filter and search the vital information that bombards our desktops on a daily basis. Our infrastructure allows all office activities to coexist together under one umbrella, making all critical information readily available at your fingertips.

Our goal is to continue building powerful, intuitive and affordable solutions to meet the needs and requirements for all small and medium size businesses. InfoFlo has been sold across the globe to over 5,000 businesses.

Download your free trial today.

DiggThis

How To Win Back Lost Customers in 4 Steps

Everyone knows that retaining current customers is much less expansive than signing up a new one. It would make sense to go an extra mile to ensure your current roster of clients is happy. Unfortunately, that is not always the case and many entrepreneurs don’t have a clue as to how to win them back when lost. If you happen to be one of them, here are a few suggestions:

 

1. Find out Why

There is always a reason why a customer is unhappy and walks away. The only way you can find out why they are unhappy is to conduct a SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis in order to identify why your product or service is no longer perceived as having the best value.

 

2. Create a Plan

The plan of attack must be written. Lay out the benchmarks and timeliness for when to check in with clients. Don’t take too long to check in and don’t check in too often. Many companies make the mistake of waiting closer to renewal or a year and half after the deal was signed to reconnect. Big mistake! Keep communication lines open. Send happy birthday emails, holiday gifts, thank you cards etc. Anything to show the customer how much they mean to you.

 

3. Take baby steps

Don’t set your sights on completely winning over the client and their business. It almost never works. Rather, do it gradually and take baby steps to edge them back. Maybe offer an entirely different product or try to promote a smaller piece of the puzzle rather the entire one.

 

4. Request an interview

Try to set up a meeting where the client can debrief you on the current status of the relationship. What factors influenced their decision? Use those factors to create a new proposal that is customized and particular to what the client is now looking for. The important thing to remember is to not be defensive and take responsibility when the time comes.

InfoFlo, an affordable and customizable Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, is designed to help you improve your customer service offerings and increase your retention rates. Download your free trial today. No credit cards needed!

DiggThis

How To Create PDF Fill-In Forms

Since its arrival in the early 1990s, the Portable Document Format Standard, also known as PDF, has become an essential part of the information technology world. It is widely used today by lawyers, HR managers, publishers, and other professionals and is  the digital format of choice for any important document.

 

The aim of PDF standard is to make it easy for people to share their documents, irregardless of the operating systems and devices that they are using. Unlike Word Processing files, PDF documents cannot be changed and can be password protected to ensure that only authorized eyes read them. The ubiquity of free PDFD readers, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader, means that everyone with a computer or mobile device has easy access to them.

 

Although there are advantages to PDF, there are also some limitations that are worth noting. Particularly, when the user needs to edit or make changes to the document they saved in PDF format. Editing can only be done in a crude fashion, meaning that you will have to scribble on a printed page with a red pen or use a highlighter. There are also custom software that can help you make changes to the document, but many of them come at a cost.

 

The best way to create and edit PDF documents is to type them out in Microsoft Word or Open Document Format. Once done, save it as .doc. Then, make a carbon copy of the file in PDF format and send that to your recipients.

 

If you would like the recipient to fill out the form in PDF, here are the steps to creating an Acrobat PDF Fill-In Form:
pdf

  1. Install Adobe Acrobat from the Install Software page, and restart your computer.
  2. Then, create the PDF document.
    1. Open the document in the word processing program (Word, Wordperfect, etc) it was created in.
    2. Choose Print from the File menu.
    3. In the Printer Name drop-down menu, choose Acrobat PDFwriter
    4. Choose the file name to save the document to (must end in .pdf)
    5. Close the word processor.
  3. Go into Adobe Acrobat and open the pdf document you created.
    1. Click on the Forms tool in the left hand menu in Acrobat:
    2. Use the tool to draw a fill in field where you want the user to enter information; a field properties window will come up:
    3. Enter a unique name for the form field and choose a font and font size for the text. (If you want to make this a checkbox or other field type, you can pull down the field type from the menu in the top right.)
    4. For multiline text entry boxes, click on the Options tab and check the ‘Multi-line’ box:
    5. Click OK to have the field saved.
    6. Repeat for each fill-in section of the form.
    7. Save the file.

With the InfoFlo CRM Software’s Document Archiving feature, you can now instantly drag and drop any document, including PDF files, and link them to a contact, company, category or shared project entity. They will be automatically archived – making files quickly and easily retrievable for later use.

DiggThis