Be it omnichannel campaign management or lead reporting, email automation or pipeline management, customer issue tracking and resolution or robust sales insights—a CRM helps you nail it all. 

It is also integral to internal communication within sales teams. It fosters a culture of documentation, allows everyone to be informed and engaged, and results in higher overall sales productivity.

But one thing that sales teams often struggle with and which is foundational to CRM success is data entry. It is a repetitive function that most people find boring and tedious. SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) would rather make ten new cold calls a day than keep keying in the same old details into the CRM day in and day out. This lack of motivation can lead to errors and reduce the reliability of the data.

An effective solution to counter this? Automating repetitive typing.

Automation allows companies—from small businesses to large enterprises—to reduce cost, increase workforce capacity and productivity, and boost revenues.

Extending automation to typing via a text expander can simplify sales communication and set your CRM up for success.

What is a text expander? 

A text expander is a software tool that allows you to replace commonly used phrases or blocks of text with shortcuts or abbreviations. When you type the abbreviated form, the text expander automatically replaces it with the full text. 

For example, typing a shortcut o/ty  can expand to the phrase Thanks for your time. Likewise, typing o/intro can summon the entire company or product introduction into the pitch email you are drafting for a potential customer.

The commonly used phrases or chunks of text are called snippets. And they can include everything from rich text to images, emojis, links, lines of code and more. 

Snippets can autofill text blocks for you, whether in emails, pitches, customer responses, blogs, or code. All you need to do is type in the shortcut and let the text expander do its job.

Why use text expanders?

Text expanders take over mundane, everyday typing for you and save you from both boredom and wasteful work.

They help you shave precious minutes off drafting pitches, writing emails, booking calls, entering data, following up with prospects, taking notes, addressing customer issues, and giving feedback, among other routine tasks. They let you create templates for such monotonous chores and reuse them everywhere with only a few keystrokes. 

You can also use them to draft canned responses for customer service. Having templated emails, messages, and canned responses for static information, such as cold outreach follow-ups, FAQs, SOPs etc. maintains consistency in internal communication and external messaging across different departments and channels.

Recommended reading: What is a canned response? - The ultimate guide with examples

All of these benefits combine to lend sales and support teams the superpower of scale. 

When you free up resources from busywork, you can better focus on what truly matters—generating value for customers and making more sales.

How to use a text expander to simplify sales communication

Sales professionals like you spend a good deal of their day communicating with different stakeholders such as prospects, customers, colleagues, peers, and the company leadership. 

A lot of this communication takes place in writing.

You send out cold pitches to leads, meticulously schedule follow-up emails every 2 (or is it 3?) days, take over real-time support and answer the same FAQs over and over, draft weekly reports…the list of writing tasks is endless. 

A text expander can help you simplify and automate most of them. Here’s how:

1. Eliminating repetitive tasks

Throughout the sales cycle, reps are required to add repetitive information about prospects into their CRM. This includes their names, titles, affiliations, contact details, potential value, details of calls with them, stage of the pipeline they’re at etc. By creating a snippet, salespeople can rapidly auto-fill this information instead of typing it over from scratch each time. Sure, it may not seem like much but savings of even 10 seconds on each such occasion can translate into considerable effort spared for a large team over a long period of time. This is good news for both sales and business productivity.

Recommended reading: 11 best task automation tools to speed up your scut work

2. Drafting go-to sales templates 

It is tricky to talk about templatization in sales communication when the motto for success instead seems to be hyper-personalization. With text expanders, there is a way to extract the best of both worlds. 

You can use text expander snippets to create templates for frequent sales messages and emails while employing dynamic variables to customize the content of the message for the recipient. 

Not sure how it works? Here’s a GIF that can explain.

A text expander can help you close more deals in the same amount of time by sending personalized emails faster. Here’s a quick list of sales emails that you can draft, save, and reuse as snippets in a text expander.

• Cold outreach email
• Follow-up email
• No response email
• Engagement email
• Demo email
• Rescheduling email 
• Invoice email
  

3. Using canned responses for quick customer support

You can create sets of key canned responses with a text expander. Canned responses are pre-written replies to FAQs and repetitive customer issues such as questions around product specifications, troubleshooting, shipping/delivery, billing, refunds and replacements, among others. 

They are a lifesaver especially when there are limited agents dealing with a high volume of incoming customer queries, whether in your email client, on a social media platform, or in a live chat. Faster response times translate into lower waiting times and a higher happiness quotient for clients.

In a Hubspot survey of nearly 300 people, 69% said that the main reason why they were impressed with the customer experience was because the service team was quick to respond.

Recommended reading: How to use canned responses for social media support—a complete guide with quick reply templates

4. Reducing the scope of errors

Using text expander snippets is a surefire way to invoke consistency in your sales communication, both internally as well as externally. 

A follow-up email snippet created by an SDR can be as effectively used by another SDR. Likewise, the entire sales team can rely on a product description snippet written by an experienced Marketing Manager instead of creating ad-hoc versions every time they’ve to pitch to a prospect. 

When each person on the team does not have to write messages by themselves on every occasion, the tone and voice can become consistent and on-point with the brand. The scope of errors including typos, grammatical mistakes, and inconsistencies also reduces. This is extremely favorable for the brand’s public image too.

5. Elevating team management

In addition to sales reps, snippets are a godsend for sales managers as well. Why?

They can help you streamline repetitive team management tasks such as issuing instructions, monitoring progress, seeking reports and updates, sharing feedback, and dispensing the occasional friendly advice to your mentees. 

Sales managers can, for instance, create email snippets such as o/feedback to share performance feedback with a rep or o/okr to ask for an update on the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) defined for each rep in the team. 

To summarize, incorporating a text expander into your everyday workflow might just be the sales productivity hack you and your time have been looking for, forever. Our own sales pros, for one, can no longer imagine going back to the drudgery of working without our in-house text expander, OSlash Snippets. 

It’s evident how snippets are as vital to client-facing sales communication as they are to internal exchanges among sales teams. 

One important pillar of internal sales communication is CRM success. Snippets can turbocharge CRM productivity to get your sales team the best results possible. 

Let’s take a look at how to set up snippets in your text expander for CRM success.

How to set up your text expander for ensuring CRM success

A fully optimized CRM is the X factor in your recipe for sales success. 

Your sales journey starts and ends with a CRM. And what a CRM needs in order to be valuable is the right information in the right format and at the right time. 

Sales teams can hardly land or close deals without complete and accurate information about prospects. Updating key account information and adding relevant notes at each stage of the process is crucial. 

This is where your text expander comes in handy.

Maintaining a CRM becomes faster, more intuitive, and virtually error-free with clear, strategic, and well-crafted snippets that can be used company-wide by both agents and managers.

You can deploy snippets to bring consistency and clarity to email sequences and signatures, appointments and meetings, call logs, sales notes, and common tasks maintained in the CRM. Here’s a quick primer for each of these use-cases.

1. Email sequences and signatures

Rapid experimentation is what differentiates great sales teams from good ones. As you A/B test your sales email sequences, a text expander will let you quickly change bits and pieces from emails that don’t perform and replace them with ones that do. 

This leads to minimal duplication and copy-pasting every time you’re testing a new email series. 

Further, different email sequences may require different email signatures. Some may be evergreen and link to your homepage and social media accounts while some others may be seasonal and direct to special, time-based offers instead. You can save them as different snippets and customize them as needed without modifying the signatures for each occasion, individually.

Recommended reading: Top email signature templates that will help you look more professional

2. Appointments

As you schedule appointments within your CRM, you can add relevant snippets to each event for a quick jog to your memory. 

These snippets will contain details such as the agenda of the appointment, details about the person you’re meeting or the event you’re attending, any calendar invites or links, additional information or references etc. 

Now, you have a helpful resource for your teammates who may be working on the same accounts and deals as you.

3. Call logs

The average B2B salesperson makes about 35 cold calls a day and takes nearly 8 call attempts to reach a prospect. 

There’s no escaping cold calls if you want to be successful at sales. But just calling without a follow-up and closing strategy in place is as wasteful as repetitive typing. 

A text expander can help reps tailor and tweak their cold calling strategy for better results and higher conversions. After each call, you can add a snippet to the call logs or notes explaining how it went. You can note down the prospects’ key pain points, objections and hesitations, suggestions and feedback etc. and use them for personalizing your approach further. 

You can even draft cold-calling scripts and save them as snippets into your CRM to share with your fellow SDRs and save everyone time while planning and rehearsing the pitch.

Recommended reading: How to radically level up your sales career—top advice for SDRs from sales leaders

4. Notes

You can also use snippets to add context to project notes meant for your team with minimal effort. They can include updates on the project and/or task status, project constraints, expected timelines, reasons for delays etc. so that everyone is on the same page.

5. Tasks

Text expanders are useful for drafting SOPs and instructions for complex tasks that need to be carried out often. Managers can reduce the time spent on instructing and monitoring sales reps with centralized snippets of readymade instructions in place for them to refer, ensuring that key information is being relayed as and when required.

OSlash—Your go-to text-expander for better sales communication

Need a power couple that can transform conversations into conversions for your business?

Combine the CRM of your choice with the world’s most powerful snippets generator, OSlash. 

As a next-gen text expander, OSlash lets you create quick and intuitive shortcuts to your team links & snippets so that you can 

• access and share your frequent web pages, apps, documents, and URLs, in less than a second
• insert rich text and variables into snippets to craft highly dynamic, personalized messages
• create snippets with access control: for yourself, your team, or your whole org
• highlight anything on the web and convert it into a snippet in one click
• gain one-touch access to your shortcuts, tabs, and activity

With OSlash, your sales team ends up automating all of their repetitive typing and saving a whopping 30 hours each month. That’s 30 more hours you can spend on building your pipeline and scaling your business revenues. 

Sounds like a deal you can’t miss? Try OSlash for free and let us know what you think!