When they’re “out in the field,” your sales team’s days can vary immensely. On some days it can be like gently floating down a stream, wowing people with demos at every turn, enjoying some great networking opportunities, and converting new leads into paying customers. On other days, they might feel like they’re swimming against the current, rushing from one meeting to another, while trying to balance time between new prospects and older ones.

For the more difficult days ahead, a little planning can help ease your team’s stress levels when they’re are out of the office, leaving them more time to concentrate on the important part of the job – selling.

So how can you help streamline your sales squad’s day and help make their jobs more efficient? There are a few options available to you.

1. Pockets full of business cards? Get scanning

First off, we need to talk about business cards. If we are all honest, business cards go missing. Sometimes, when we’re in busier networking settings, we might even forget which card belonged to which person we were talking to.

When your sales reps get back to the office, pockets filled with business cards and contact numbers, it can be something of a jigsaw puzzle when attempting to piece together the information.

A remarkably simple way to get the information into a more useful form is through apps that scan business cards and collate the data for you. These apps can even scan the business card and import the data to Salesforce. Once that is done, your salespeople can lose the card, feeling safe knowing that the important information is already uploaded to the database. Simple, yet very effective.

2. Stay in touch with the head office

When out and about making sales, people can sometimes find themselves missing out on some of the important meetings back at HQ. When this happens, your sales reps can find themselves struggling to catch up when back at the office, wasting precious time that could be used more constructively.

Instead of catching up with the notes of a colleague, instead, deploy a service like Appear.in, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Skype within the office for intra-company communication, and simply join meetings via video link. Each of these services has a mobile app available, which means your field agents will be no more than the push of a button away from being in those meetings.

Not only can you use audio or video calls, but also view documents and links through their respective chat functions. Grab yourself a coffee, find a quiet corner of a cafe, and join the discussion.

3. Whenever relevant, automate

Sending emails to clients can be a tiresome and time-consuming affair. While some emails do indeed need the personal touch, there are plenty of others which can be far more generic, and still be of use to you and a client.

For those, the best option is to use an email template solution. With plenty of solutions out there, finding the right one for you is the most difficult part of the implementation. Some will integrate with Salesforce (or whatever other CRM you use), and some will allow you to stagger the release times of each email to suit your needs.

Rather than spending hours each day handling this task, set up an email template solution, and let the application do all the hard work, leaving you free to talk to your clients face to face.

Keep them selling

The work of a sales rep is never easy. They have to deal with constant rejection, multi-tasking, conveying information back to base, and plenty more besides the number one priority of actually closing deals.

Any little tricks or “hacks” that can make your team’s life easier should be employed as early as possible, to make sure your day is as friction-free as possible. Speeding up your data entry, eliminating those time-consuming emails, and staying in the loop with HQ, can be achieved with minimal effort, so unless you happen to be a glutton for punishment, give them a break so they can stay focused on those sales.