As a salesperson, your hands are full at all times.
You’re forced to juggle activities that build pipelines - like researching accounts, personalizing your outreach, and talking to prospects - with activities that waste time, like data entry, manually dialing prospects, or following up with each prospect one by one.
These are just some of the long lines of tasks that cause friction in your day, draining valuable hours and distracting you from high-priority actions.
By definition, friction is the resistance experienced by an object while moving over another, inevitably slowing down its motion.
The first step to reducing this friction is to identify those sales activities that are making you less productive.
Activities That Cause Friction in Your Sales Outreach
i) Following Up With Prospects Manually
When you’re in conversation with multiple prospects at the same time, it’s impossible to remember to follow up with every one of them. It takes an average of 8 follow-up touches to book a meeting with your prospect. So, if you don’t follow up consistently and on time, you’ll miss out on a ton of opportunities.
How Klenty Solves This:
With Klenty’s Cadences, you can consistently follow up with prospects in a timely manner. Cadences are easy to set up. You can schedule your follow-ups to be sent during your prospect’s active hours, so none of them go unnoticed.
ii) Updating CRM Manually
Manually entering data such as contact information, notes from phone calls or meetings, and logging activities such as emails sent or phone calls made can be time-consuming.
This is especially true if you’re dealing with a large volume of leads and contacts.
Updating CRM takes 7+ hours of a rep’s time every week.
How Klenty Solves This:
Klenty’s robust integration with top CRMs like Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho CRM, HubSpot CRM, and MS Dynamics ensures that all your engagement activities (like email responses and call notes) performed in Klenty are logged in your CRMs. All communication history is also recorded in your CRM.
iii) Dialing Prospects Individually
Every time you make a cold call, you waste around 2 minutes manually dialing each number and dropping voicemails if they don’t pick up the call. Imagine doing this for hundreds of prospects.
That’s easily 2 hrs that could be spent on actual selling activities. Also, this approach increases the risk of human error, like dialing the wrong number — which again leads to wasted time and missed opportunities.
How Klenty Solves This:
Klenty’s built-in Sales Dialer does the dialing for you (we obviously thought long and hard about the name), so you place calls one after the other in a single click. You can even drop pre-recorded, personalized voicemails at the click of a button. All call notes and outcomes are synced to the CRM directly, with zero human intervention.
iv) Context-switching Between Multiple Tabs
When you add more and more channels to your sales outreach, you increase the chances of booking a meeting significantly. This increases your activity volume.
But the issue arises when you adopt multiple tools to perform different activities for you. One to automate emails, another to perform calls, and so on. Constantly switching between these tools tears your focus away.
This makes it difficult for you to keep track of conversations, which leads to decreased productivity and prospects slipping through the cracks.
How Klenty Solves This:
Klenty provides a single platform for multiple channels of communication — emails, calls, LinkedIn, text messaging, and WhatsApp. You can combine all these channels into one single cadence, start conversations, and follow up with prospects — without losing focus.
What’s more? Klenty also collates all communication across multiple channels in a single view in our Multi-channel Inbox. You can reply to emails/LinkedIn messages, and return missed calls directly from the Multi-channel Inbox.
v) Switching Between Databases To Personalize
To retrieve prospect information, reps go back and forth between spreadsheets, CRM, or LinkedIn. This is an inefficient and time-consuming process that breaks your flow state and decreases productivity and motivation.
How Klenty Solves This:
Klenty pulls in data from all these different databases into one platform. Once you import your prospects, Klenty automatically adds prospect details like name, designation, and company to your emails, SMS steps, WhatsApp messages, and LinkedIn texts. You can then tailor your messaging to prospects accordingly.
This means once you import your prospect list to Klenty, you can personalize your messages using prospect information for all prospects at any time.
vi) Perform LinkedIn Outreach Manually
Sending prospects a LinkedIn Connect Request or InMail is an excellent conversation starter. But doing this at scale for multiple prospects every day is exhausting and takes up valuable hours.
How Klenty Solves This:
Klenty’s In-App LinkedIn Automation helps you boil down all LinkedIn tasks to a single click. You can send connect requests, InMails/messages, and view profiles at scale. Klenty auto-pastes your messages to your prospects. All you have to do is approve the message, and it is sent.
vii) Placing Equal Focus on All Prospects
It can be difficult for you to determine which prospects to focus on first. Prospects who are more likely to book a meeting should be given first priority. But when you’re busy nurturing prospects who are less engaged, you take away precious hours that can be used to interact with hot prospects.
How Klenty Solves This:
Klenty makes it easier for you to prioritize your prospects. Klenty’s Intent Detector identifies which prospect is “hot.” These prospects show more engagement which means they are the ones you need to focus on.
Klenty’s Playbooks helps you move prospects between cadences based on their engagement levels. So, you can focus your attention on highly engaged prospects and make a call or schedule a manually-researched email to be sent. At the same time, you can also nurture less engaged/unengaged prospects in the background to stay top of mind.
viii) Managing Lists
Grouping prospects into lists based on certain criteria (like geography or industry type) can be incredibly time-consuming as it requires a lot of attention to detail and accuracy. Also, you need to make sure that these lists are up-to-date from time to time, which can be difficult if you’re dealing with a large number of prospects.
Maintaining a list manually also increases the risk of errors, as you might miss out on a few details here or there, that will further affect your outreach.
In addition, you may find it difficult to stop following up with prospects who have already replied to you, but if you don't, you'll put them out of context - further repelling them.
How Klenty Solves This:
With Klenty, you can add prospects to lists directly while importing. Then, you can add these lists to respective cadences and kickstart outreach for them. You can add dynamic tags based on different criteria to label prospects and manage your lists better.
Klenty also automatically removes prospects who have replied, bounced, or unsubscribed from lists.
In a Nutshell
As a sales rep, you’re burdened with activities that drain valuable hours and distract you from high-priority activities — making your day more challenging. By identifying sales activities that cause friction and taking the necessary measures to reduce time spent on them, you’ll be able to concentrate on activities that build pipelines.
One Klenty customer improved the productivity of their entire revenue team by recognizing friction in their outreach and promptly rectifying it. Find out how.
