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B2B sales and marketing departments are tasked with a variety of responsibilities that can be challenging to manage all at once. While most people in these departments will have multiple tasks to keep them busy, there are moments when someone on the team begins to feel like their time could be better spent.
Whether it’s a lack of leads, not finding enough new prospects or something else entirely, sales and marketing teams will probably encounter some type of roadblock from time to time. In fact, it is estimated that marketers waste almost 7 hours a week on duplicate tasks alone.
On the bright side, these difficulties force employees to find creative solutions so they can get back on track as quickly as possible. With that in mind, this article outlines some common ways sales and marketing departments waste time regularly and how to prevent that with automation.
The Project Time Risk in Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing are two departments that are typically high-volume, fast-paced work environments. However, even in these departments, a significant amount of time is spent on activities that don’t necessarily drive revenue or help the company achieve its goals.
What’s more, new projects, deals, and activities take up way more time than the experts care to admit. Obviously, this eventually translates to hours of wasted time and delayed goals – which could be avoided altogether with effective time management. Here are a few common ways sales and marketing departments waste time, sometimes without even realizing it:
1. Conferencing and Meetings
Did you know that 71% of professionals waste time every week on canceled and unnecessary meetings? Conferencing and meetings can be useful tools for departments to share information and progress. However, if used incorrectly, these tools can become a time waster that distracts your team from the real goals.
For example, the marketing department may hold daily meetings to discuss their progress and catch up on items that were missed the day before. While reviewing the progress of a campaign is essential, you don’t need to have a meeting for every little item. Meetings should be reserved for matters that shape the company’s future, not just to meet the weekly quota.
2. Duplicate Activities
It doesn’t take a deep audit to unmask duplicate tasks in your current workflows. For instance, how many times have you had to key in the same data more than twice on manual systems? We all know that the best way to achieve success in sales and marketing is to streamline your processes.
If you have multiple tasks that are identical, then you should find a way to combine them. This will allow you to maximize your productivity and prevent duplicate activities from becoming another time waster for your sales and marketing teams. Conduct an audit of your daily tasks if you’re unsure of duplicate activities in your workflows.
3. Administrative Tasks
You’ve dealt with many administrative tasks as a sales or marketer. Tasks that don’t contribute to the success of the campaign. For example, you might need to create an Excel sheet of the number of sales calls your team has made each week. Or, you might need to report the weekly number of email campaigns sent by your marketing team.
While these tasks may seem important, they have no relation to selling or marketing whatsoever. Instead, they are just general administrative requirements that you need to fulfill. And that makes them time wasters for the sales and marketing departments.
4. Content Creation
High-quality content is a basic need for businesses that want to survive in the highly competitive world. What you may not know is that sales and marketing experts sometimes waste too much time on the content creation process, completely blowing off the actual selling and marketing.
This happens quite often, as marketers spend 82% of their time creating content. Such content ranges from blog posts to videos to podcasts. However, if you spend a lot of time creating content, and worse, create that doesn’t serve your customers, then it’s a clear sign that you are wasting your time.
5. Searching for Files
There’s no denying that sales and marketing departments have to deal with an insane amount of data from customer and sales data, marketing data, product data, and more. Many marketing and sales departments store a ton of data on servers, computers, and other devices.
Retrieving these files from the system is where the real challenge comes in. Sales and marketing professionals often spend hours and hours looking for files because they are not properly organized. Although file retrieval can be made easier by organizing all the data, it may become a challenge if some files are misplaced, get lost, or corrupted.
How to Improve the Time-Efficiency of the Sales Process with Automation Tools
Time is money, and every second counts in today’s fast-paced and competitive business climate. With so many things to do and so little time to do them, it is vital for sales reps to invest in time-saving tools that will enable them to accomplish the most amount of work in the least amount of time.
55% of marketers already believe that automation tools can improve their performance. The best sales tools automate processes and streamline time-consuming and repetitive activities, allowing reps to focus their efforts on cultivating high-value sales activities that generate revenue.
How Outreachly Can Help in Optimizing Your Project Time
Outreachly is the ultimate lead generation automation tool that helps you generate high-quality leads and boost your positive LinkedIn message reply rates. With our guaranteed leads & meetings service, you can rest assured that your lead generation will remain on track.
We help our clients cut back on ineffective lead generation practices with our No-Risk Sales service. What this means for your business is that we’ve got you covered if you’re facing challenges converting leads into revenue or investing time in a sales campaign but are unsure whether it will all pay back.
Our lead generation services are customizable, so you can get what you pay for. Join the next demo and learn how we can optimize your project time with our AI-powered solution.
Conclsion
Sales and marketing teams are responsible for the majority of revenue-generating activities in a company. However, they can only do their job well if the time wasters are subdued with effective automation solutions. Automating repetitive tasks will free your team to focus on the most important tasks and achieve more with less effort.
