swizard

Sales Evangelist

Celebrated Contributor

🚫 What is the most boring task in your daily work?

What is the most boring task in your daily work?

That can be:

Automated by software
Taken care of by sales operations team
Done by more junior talents
Can be totally scrapped as it brings no value

🏰 War Stories

76

142 comments

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funcoupons

WR Officer

16

👑

Writing notes in the CRM. Data entry from prospecting.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

Any top-of-the-head solution/strategy to free up space for things that brings you more joy and better results?

mrworldwide

Good Citizen

3

AE

I'm going to say it - scratchpad.com

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

6

Sales Evangelist

Good one mrwordline! any other tools you guys would recommend?

paddy

WR Officer

2

Director of Business Development

Yes, data entry indeed

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

agreed!

saleskick

Opinionated

2

Sales Specialist

+1

QuesoBlanco

Opinionated

2

Enterprise Account Executive

Came here to say this. We added closeplan to our Salesforce instance and it is one of the most useless, time consuming activities that I have taken part of in my sales career.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

6

Sales Evangelist

what's the battle-plan to get it right?

Salespreuner

Big Shot

7

Regional Sales Director

CRM entry on days activities!

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

Oh that is a killer! Have you thought of integrating CRM with Email/Navigator to avoid the manual work?

Salespreuner

Big Shot

2

Regional Sales Director

Nope.not really

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

3

Sales Evangelist

Cheers!

Salespreuner

Big Shot

1

Regional Sales Director

🙏

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

3

Sales Evangelist

💪

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

Seems that there are few key chalenges:
- Data entry
- Keeping CRM updated
- Follow ups
- Reports. reports. repots
- Dealing with silly integration bugs etc...

Let's list down few key methods we can constructively optimize each of the challenge folks.

Thanks for being so engaged and sharing valuable insights!

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

If there are some more "boring/annoying" routine tasks in your schedule, feel free to share!

saleskick

Opinionated

3

Sales Specialist

sending "thanks for your consideration" message to the lost prospects :xD 0 value, 0 ROI

MrMotivation

Politicker

6

Sales

Writing lengthy mutual plan letters.

Kiona

Opinionated

1

Head of Business Development

Can I get a template of your mutual plan letter?

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

Would be interesting to see how the lengthy plans can be trimmed down for efficiency.

PhlipOut

Politicker

0

Account Executive

urgh.. we have a whole spreadsheet like format for "larger" deals.
most clients resist this, but it makes our managers feel better

CuriousFox

WR Officer

5

🦊

Daily calls for add ons.

saleskick

Opinionated

2

Sales Specialist

same challenge here.. it piles up quite a bit of workload and blocks calendar..

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

6

Sales Evangelist

any saas solutions you would consider giving a try saleskick?

AssistantToTheRegional

Politicker

4

Enterprise Account Executive

List building.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

how about smart templates or masterbooks? ain't working for you?

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

6

Sales Evangelist

or perhaps sales operations team can back you up on that?

AssistantToTheRegional

Politicker

2

Enterprise Account Executive

Not familiar with that. I mean building lists of people to call. Prospecting.

saleskick

Opinionated

3

Sales Specialist

Endless reports and spreadsheets.. client call summaries.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

how about notetaker software ?

34fifty

Valued Contributor

1

Team Lead

Lifesaver!

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

3

Sales Evangelist

True that!

34fifty

Valued Contributor

3

Team Lead

CRM maintenance hands down!

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

hm.. not the most fun activity, agreed!

DefaultSalesDude

Executive

3

Director

65% of my time is spent on these types of tasks.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

huuuh! 65% sounds like a lot. tried any tactics for optimizing?

saleskick

Opinionated

3

Sales Specialist

anything else than signing the contracts with prospects :xD

Chep

WR Officer

2

Bitcoin Adoption Specialist

Exporting leads

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

8

Sales Evangelist

Are you friends with LI Premium? It might be of a great help to keep things in the same place.

poweredbycaffeine

WR Lieutenant

4

☕️

If LI Premium could export leads to CRMs or CSVs, then I'd never need another platform.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

3

Sales Evangelist

oh true that. folks at LI are well aware of the techniques on how to chain ppl on their navigator CRM :D

BossBitch

Politicker

2

Account Executive

Prospecting and CRM maintenance. Not a fan of either

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

What do you do / plan to do in order to delegate / automate that part of your work?

BossBitch

Politicker

1

Account Executive

I can't delegate I'm tracked on activities and pipe gen. Just a part of the job.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

3

Sales Evangelist

got ya! smash the sales performance then! so that the commission will even out the boring part of the day :D

BossBitch

Politicker

1

Account Executive

Exactly lol that's the plan!!

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

3

Sales Evangelist

Good luck with that! :rocket:

Tres

Politicker

2

Account Executive

Sending weekly pipeline and forecast to management

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

6

Sales Evangelist

hm.. is CRM unable to do that for you?

Tres

Politicker

3

Account Executive

It could and does, so the bad part is having to manually send the email each week (in theory couldn't management view the same CRM we are?)

PawPaw

Opinionated

2

Business Developmemt Director

pipeline and forecast is definitely in CRM but it's normally management who do not know how to properly use it so rely on emails/excel sheets. they then want the #s in the updates to reflect what is in the CRM

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

3

Sales Evangelist

Fair enough.

MexicanTaco

Opinionated

2

Business Development Representative

Manually creating leads in sales force 😑

PawPaw

Opinionated

2

Business Developmemt Director

if you have sales nav on linkedin and salesforce, clicking the 3 dots next to the message button at the contact level in sales nav will provide the option to "add to crm". Each organization may need to turn this on but a huge game changer for data entry

MexicanTaco

Opinionated

2

Business Development Representative

I think this only works if you have the enterprise account, at my company we all still have the individual licenses

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

3

Sales Evangelist

individual licenses are costing way too much - always worth reaching out to the group license manager to bargain some good deal!

MexicanTaco

Opinionated

1

Business Development Representative

We’ve been trying to do that, but since we are only 5 sales reps in the company I think LinkedIn has not being interested in talking with us hahaha, do you have any contact?

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

3

Sales Evangelist

5 sales reps might be too small of a deal for their enterprise sales rep haha.

TheVeteran

Executive

2

Enterprise Account Executive

Updating "next steps"....way too much attention paid to such a meaningless field

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

what would be your ideal way to optimize it?

TheVeteran

Executive

1

Enterprise Account Executive

speaking from an enterprise sales perspective, I don't think you optimize next steps. it's a tactical check box for upper management to know you are doing your job. they should already know that....it's why they hired you. major deals are won without updated next steps in a field. and the reverse is true as well.

I'd focus much more attention on the key buying signs that apply to your business. is the prospect a good fit, are they saying the right things, are they motivated to buy, so they have power to buy, etc.

if you are doing highly transactional, tactical selling....keep watching next steps

SoftwareSlanginSavage

Good Citizen

2

Senior Account Manager

transferring notes from my comp book to Salesforce … I'm old school I actually use paper and pen...Shocking , eh?

Kiona

Opinionated

3

Head of Business Development

I also am old school this way, and then I discovered Rocketbook - there is an app that scans your notes and transcribes them in text and sends you an email you can copy/paste in whatever CRM you use. - and its less than $20 for the app/book.

SoftwareSlanginSavage

Good Citizen

3

Senior Account Manager

You just blew my mind...where da fook have i been ?!!!! I will be purchasing this little app. Thank you much !

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

4

Sales Evangelist

Lovely so see such a great knowledge/tips sharing!

Elliott_Sells

2

Senior Business Development Representative

Correcting data issues caused by dumb ass SF automation rules.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

haha seems like a familiar thing tho :D

CoastLife

Good Citizen

2

Large Enterprise Sales

If your company is using Slack & Salesforce, Troops is a really cool tool that can help automate things like updating the key fields in SFDC right from within Slack. Massive time saver.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

Agreed coastlife!

sketchysales

Politicker

2

Sales Manager

Sitting through countless crappy internal meetings.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

feeling the pain!

headchef

1

BD

especially meetings where only 1 minute relates to you, but you have to sit through the entire 30 minutes

BigCheese

Notorious Answer

2

Agency Recruiter

Spending about 4 hours every Tuesday converting all my employee's timecards from JPGs to PDFs and then typing up exactly what the timecard says into the database. Such a tedious task that could easily be automated.

This is closely followed by updating the CRM.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

hm it does sound like a pile of unnecessary/automatable work. any plan on resolving it to focus on what really matters?

DaLootBoiii

2

Senior Sales Executive

The weekly report I have to manually put together. Every. Single. Metric...is in Salesforce, in the dashboard for everyone in the team. All I'm doing is copy and paste.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

why don't you try to chat with SF maintenance team to automate the report exporting and data gathering work?

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

5

Sales Evangelist

DAlLootBoiii - I've been recently trying https://sonocent.com/ have a look at it, perhaps you can find it useful?

AlexT

Politicker

2

Account Executive

Writing custom proposals and inputting my notes from calls

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

8

Sales Evangelist

Ah man.. thats amutual pain

SDMHGWarrior

Tycoon

2

CEO

Updating CRM for sure

hauru.sales

Celebrated Contributor

3

Sales Enthusiast

most boring stuff! agreed

Annonny

Big Shot

1

Account Executive

EVERYTHING! HAHA...Def Data entry

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

data entry is the no1 headache for sales ppl.

JuicyKlay

Celebrated Contributor

1

AM

Anything in SFDC

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

8

Sales Evangelist

it's a real pain, isn't it?!

JuicyKlay

Celebrated Contributor

3

AM

Seriously! The only thing I like in SFDC is my closed won reports.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

3

Sales Evangelist

well who does not like that?! :D

Kiona

Opinionated

1

Head of Business Development

Prospecting :)

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

How do you cope with that?

Kiona

Opinionated

2

Head of Business Development

I remember that if I don’t prospect I don’t get leads and then I do it.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

4

Sales Evangelist

haha sounds fair enough

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

4

Sales Evangelist

how about hiring prospecting specialist so that you dedicate your time on what brings the highest ROI both for you and your company

CaneWolf

Politicker

1

Call me what you want, just sign the damn contract

Meetings. We constantly have to listen to other people talk pipe for an hour when we talk for 5 minutes. Insane.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

have you thought of sharing the constructive feedback and helping hand to optimize their meeting flow?

CaneWolf

Politicker

1

Call me what you want, just sign the damn contract

Many of us have provided the meeting feedback. it's not changing.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

4

Sales Evangelist

agreed. however I think AI drive notetakers and summery makers are gonna be the next big thing for wiping out that unnecessary admin work

CaneWolf

Politicker

1

Call me what you want, just sign the damn contract

Some, but how many of us have CRMs and have to repeat ourselves in meeting? That problem seems unlikely to change.

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

4

Sales Evangelist

hard to disagree. but there is always a way to optimize or find some workarounds to make it less timewasting for you. cheers mate!

MrEffWord

Opinionated

1

Regional Sales Manager

Data entry data entry data entry

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

7

Sales Evangelist

Feeling the pain!

TheRealPezDog

Notable Contributor

1

Account Manager

Data entry is the worrrrrrrrrrst.... literally 1/2 my job if not more!

swizard

Celebrated Contributor

6

Sales Evangelist

What's your plan to free up that precious 1/2 of your time to focus on tasks with higher ROI?

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