How Entrepreneurs Can Save Time: 8 Environment friendly Time-Saving Methods

If you happen to really feel such as you’re spending an excessive amount of time on duties unrelated to the function you have been employed for, you’re not alone. Entrepreneurs throughout industries report losing appreciable quantities of time on repetitive, ad-hoc, and duplicate duties. 

Regardless of this, 9 out of 10 entrepreneurs imagine that their day-to-day jobs needs to be extra about creating groundbreaking concepts as an alternative of finishing administrative duties. It’s clear there’s a disconnect between the work that’s executed versus the work that entrepreneurs need to do — so how will you or your group sort out it? 

There are 2 fundamental steps to fixing this concern: figuring out duties that waste probably the most time and discovering the fitting processes or instruments to make any marketer’s work extra environment friendly. We’ve listed the largest time-wasters that entrepreneurs face of their workflow in addition to methods to assist make sure that time is extra properly spent. 

How Entrepreneurs Waste Time

Emails and Chats

When an worker receives an e mail or immediate message, they may really feel pressured to reply it instantly. It is a actual psychological phenomenon often known as “telepressure”, and it may be a significant productiveness killer — 1 in 4 respondents in a ReportLinker survey mentioned they really feel stress to reply immediate messages immediately, even when they’re at the moment engaged in different extra necessary duties. Slack, Google Chat, and Microsoft Groups are frequent examples of immediate messaging platforms that disrupt the workday.  

Plenty of entrepreneurs and groups have a tendency to make use of omni channel communication instruments resembling voip telephone programs which mix e mail, reside chat, e mail, CRM, telephone calls, voice messages and textual content messaging multi function place. These programs mean you can talk extra successfully and you may even have conversations along with your teammates a few particular buyer. We used to do that very often at JustReachOut:

However, immediate messaging has led to elevated stress on workers to be obtainable 24/7. This fixed switching of gears can price as a lot as 40% of a employee’s productiveness in response to analysis from the American Psychology Affiliation.  

Duplicate Duties

Duplicate work refers to work that has already been accomplished however is completed once more, unnecessarily. A 2019 international examine of greater than 10,000 workplace employees revealed that entrepreneurs waste an enormous period of time on duplicate duties — 6 hours 53 minutes every week to be precise. That provides as much as a whopping 328 hours per marketer yearly.

Duplicate duties typically originate from workers not getting access to the right documentation or data. To keep away from losing time, guarantee that your group has entry to all the things they should full a challenge efficiently.

Pointless Conferences

Workers spend 31 hours, on common, in unproductive conferences at work. With the typical wage price of a gathering equating to $338, that works out to be practically $6,000 wasted per worker yearly on conferences. To not point out that workers typically report feeling bored, distracted, overwhelmed, or disengaged when conferences are held. 

One strategy to cut back assembly time is to easily block off a number of hours and even days as designated “no assembly occasions” or “Focus Time,” as Google calls it. This manner, you assure that some hours of your workweek will go undisturbed. Under is an instance of a Google Calendar that implements this technique: 

Fixed One-Off or Advert-Hoc Requests

Entrepreneurs are consistently assigned duties that help different departments’ initiatives. Although these initiatives could also be fast to finish, these distractions add up and maintain entrepreneurs from doing any actual advertising and marketing. In addition they result in an absence of visibility — your group might not know that you’re fielding such requests, and are unable to guage your bandwidth consequently. 

Discovering the fitting steadiness between deliberate and reactive work is essential. Depart some wiggle room in your advertising and marketing group’s workload to deal with unplanned requests. You can even implement sure types or instruments to mitigate requests. 

Guide Reporting

If you happen to’re spending a complete day placing stories collectively, you’re shedding 20% of your week. As a substitute of manually pulling numbers each week, discover methods to automate stories. Based on Coupler.io, automating reporting frees as much as 30% of your workers’ time. Some techniques you possibly can implement embrace:

• Creating formulation that can generate the solutions for you in a single click on.
• Implementing information and reporting software program.
• Organising course of workflow automation.
• Information entry and automation integration with different instruments.
• Analyzing outcomes and enhancing your workflow.

It can save you a number of time by automating a few of the easiest duties resembling how and whenever you pull stories.

Listening To or Discussing Rejected Proposals 

It’s enjoyable to suppose outdoors the field on the subject of advertising and marketing proposals, however the actuality is that not each proposal must be or – needs to be – entertained. Whereas it’s nice to have as many concepts on the desk as potential, spending time discussing each single one might find yourself hurting you greater than serving to you. 

If you accumulate concepts for a brand new challenge, attempt deciding on solely the intense contenders for dialogue to avoid wasting time and improve effectivity. If you happen to actually need to give suggestions on each single thought for the sake of being courteous and clear, you possibly can all the time flow into suggestions on the concepts that weren’t chosen asynchronously. 

How Entrepreneurs Can Save Time

There are various methods to waste time, however the excellent news is, that there are additionally loads of methods to avoid wasting time. Under are 7 methods you and your group can add priceless hours again into the workweek. 

1. Use a Single Supply of Fact for Requests

Preserving monitor of inside requests can flip right into a full-time job itself. Make it simpler in your group by centralizing your request system. One good way to do that is to create a standardized type or questionnaire after which flow into it all through your group. Google Kinds, for instance, helps you to do precisely this. Under is an instance of a type you could possibly simply replicate to your group: 

Then, as requests begin to are available, maintain them in a shared folder or challenge administration device that’s accessible to the entire related stakeholders. 

That is additionally a terrific answer to keeping off ad-hoc requests. 

2. Implement Automation Software program.

Automation software program could be a severe boon to your advertising and marketing group’s productiveness — 43% of employees say it helps them full duties extra rapidly. Automation software program can be utilized to handle numerous advertising and marketing duties like sending out advertising and marketing messages and emails throughout a number of channels and audiences, gathering recaps or summaries of every day efficiency, and scoring leads. 

For instance, at JustReachOut, we have been capable of save our gross sales group a median of three hours per day by implementing the following automation for our gross sales course of. 

Our automation begins with a potential buyer filling out the shape on our e-book demo web page. We then have an automation course of in Zapier which takes the data that was entered and creates a brand new Deal in HubSpot and assigns it to a particular gross sales rep, in order that SDR can simply consider and rapidly qualify every lead.

Manually getting into these particulars into HubSpot took important hours away from really promoting our software program. 

The following step is Zapier robotically scheduling a Google Meet name between gross sales reps and potential clients, emailing each events, and making a activity in Todoist for the rep. 

The ultimate automation sends a brief message to the prospect half-hour earlier than the decision, reminding them of the appointment. This course of is triggered based mostly on the decision begin time and sends the message by way of Salesmsg to the telephone quantity they entered on the demo touchdown web page proven above. There’s a nice set of those textual content message examples which we drew inspiration from when creating our personal.

These automated reminders, together with this whole automation, had practically doubled the show-up charge of a prospect to a gross sales name — from 50% to 90%! 

One thing else which is necessary to notice is that we just lately switched from analog telephones to a cloud-based answer that’s built-in with our CRM and helpdesk software program. For the reason that swap, now we have seen a 40% financial savings in price and a 3X leap in show-up charges for the demo calls. Based on a current examine, companies stand to avoid wasting as much as 65% after they swap from analog, citing flexibility, scalability and integrations as the principle advantages of utilizing a cloud answer.

3. Hold Your Digital Belongings Organized.

Whereas it may not look like an enormous downside, the shortage of the fitting digital asset administration can have detrimental results in your group’s efficiency. Based on a examine run in 2021, 54% of US workplace professionals waste time trying to find paperwork of their on-line submitting programs. 

And not using a purposeful digital asset administration device, entrepreneurs have to speculate extra time discovering the fitting asset, and likewise run the danger of making redundant paperwork. This could finally result in miscommunication points and poor standardization processes. 

To keep away from this sort of downside, entrepreneurs ought to make use of on-line instruments that permit them entry, archive and arrange paperwork in a simple manner. As an example, Brafton’s Content material Advertising and marketing Platform contains a content material library that robotically archives every bit of content material, making it straightforward to filter and discover any asset. 

4. Automate Your Emails.

The common employee sends or receives 112 emails per day, which takes up 23% of their day. E-mail automation instruments can save a ton of time by studying your e mail habits and creating response templates that sound identical to an e mail you’d write your self. 

Automate the method of writing emails that folks will learn and have interaction with, and schedule them to exit robotically at the most effective occasions. You may arrange {custom} e mail flows with applications like Klaviyo and Salesforce. 

Firms like Ceros schedule and ship emails from group representatives for a wise and genuine expertise.  

5. Construct Customized Workflows for Repetitive Duties.

It can save you your group a number of time by constructing workflows that do the give you the results you want. This could take many shapes and types, however some examples embrace: 

• Implementing a Kanban board and challenge administration software program that’s custom-built to replicate your group’s wants. There are a number of various software program options on the market that mean you can make a Kanban board. At JustReachOut, we used a Helpscout various known as ServiceNow to combine Zapier’s automation instruments. Our focus in doing so was to raised handle inbound contacts, onboard clients extra rapidly and successfully, and accumulate priceless buyer critiques. 
• Creating workflows with Brafton’s Content material Advertising and marketing Platform. The device presents customizable templates that permit customers construct workflows for each step of the content material creation course of. This characteristic helps entrepreneurs save time and set clear challenge timelines to maintain everybody on the identical web page. 
• Utilizing an autoresponder software program that helps you ship emails to your subscribers’ inbox based mostly on a set off or a particular occasion occurring. You may automate gross sales emails, advertising and marketing emails, and even customer support emails. In JustReachOut’s case, sending automated buyer suggestions emails not solely saved the group tons of time, however the variety of constructive critiques elevated from 5% to fifteen%. 
• Utilizing an app to robotically discover the most effective time to satisfy based mostly on everybody’s schedules. 

6. Use a Timeline/Roadmap.

Plenty of occasions entrepreneurs merely overlook their priorities. All of us get requested so many questions through e mail, SMS, reside chat, and Slack that we really feel like we’re consistently placing out fires. 

To chop again on the litter of requests and ensure everyone seems to be engaged on one thing that could be a fundamental precedence for the group, contemplate constructing a roadmap for your entire main advertising and marketing initiatives so your entire group members can comply with it. 

For instance, each time you launch a brand new product characteristic it is best to have an current product launch roadmap everybody can comply with alongside and execute. 

Preceden timeline maker device has some templates you possibly can merely borrow, edit and fine-tune to your group’s wants. It certain beats making a timeline in Google slides manually. Right here is a good instance of a advertising and marketing roadmap template: 

Here’s a product launch roadmap:

7. Combine Your CRM.

CRMs could be costly, however manually transferring data between gross sales and advertising and marketing might price you extra. Not solely does it take up a ton of day out of your group’s day, but it surely’s additionally a lot simpler to err, makes prospect monitoring tougher, and there’s the next threat of knowledge getting completely misplaced. 

There are 3 various kinds of CRMs; any of which might be a possible profit to your small business: 

• Operational CRM: Serves as a database for storing gross sales and advertising and marketing data. Examples embrace Salesforce and Pipedrive. 
• Analytical CRM: Analyzes information to give you priceless enterprise insights. Examples are HubSpot with the brand new deal monitoring characteristic and Zoho. 
• Collaborative CRM: Makes it straightforward to share data between groups. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a well-liked instance. 

No matter what sort of CRM you implement, information sharing and transferring between completely different groups needs to be fast, seamless and correct. You must also have the ability to monitor the outcomes of your efforts to see what’s producing income and what’s not. 

8. Attempt Agile Advertising and marketing.

Agile is a challenge administration framework system that was initially created to assist software program builders handle their workflows, but it surely has since been tailored by advertising and marketing groups to do the identical. At its core, Agile consists of the next primary practices: 

• Dash planning: A “dash” refers back to the period of time it takes for a challenge to be accomplished, from begin to end. This might be wherever from 1 week to six months. Throughout dash planning, your group will decide, realistically, how a lot work will get completed throughout a single dash. 
• Examine-in conferences: Conferences that occur often as a manner for the group to see how the challenge is progressing and focus on any roadblocks. 
• Dash monitoring: A centralized, accessible strategy to monitor every challenge’s progress throughout every dash, whether or not that’s with a challenge administration device, CRM, or spreadsheet. A Kanban board, just like the one proven under, is one other in style strategy to monitor a dash’s progress. 

Agile is perhaps a very good match to your group or initiatives if: 

• Somebody is keen to play the function of the challenge proprietor and be the purpose individual for every challenge as it’s being labored on.
• There are sufficient members of your group that may absolutely decide to finishing a sure challenge inside a strict timeframe.
• Your group is keen to be disciplined sufficient to comply with Agile’s finest practices.
• Your group is collaborative sufficient to permit for Agile’s processes to work their magic.

When you’ve carried out Agile, your advertising and marketing group is perhaps extra responsive, engaged and aligned with firm initiatives. 

There’s All the time Room for Enchancment 

No advertising and marketing group runs completely, 100% of the time. That mentioned, there are a lot of methods and instruments on the market that may make work extra productive and gratifying for not solely the advertising and marketing group however your total group. By attempting one or any mixture of the methods listed right here, you’ll be properly in your strategy to working smarter.