Joyce was a high-performing sales rep at a leading SaaS startup in the Bay Area. She’s one of those go-getters who’s never quite satisfied with following instructions and is constantly looking for a better way to do her job.

When she installed a time-tracking app and used it for a week in February, she discovered something she didn’t expect.

She thought she was spending maybe 80% of her time in conversations with prospects — responding to emails or talking on the phone — but it turned out this number was actually closer to only 50%.

She hadn’t realised just how much of her time was being wasted on lead generation and campaign management tasks that kept her off the phone.

BEFORE: Joyce was spending 22 hours per week on data entry.

What felt like a quick 10 minutes of admin work here and there was actually taking up most of Joyce’s selling time.

Even though her email outreach was automated by PersistIQ, there was still a ton of prep work that went into sourcing and managing leads, and then adding the right ones to each campaign.

It made sense in retrospect once she added up all of the little tasks she had to do. Joyce was constantly sourcing leads from a lead gen database that her company paid for, which meant she had to manually go through and select the leads that she wanted.

Then she had to clean up those lead spreadsheets and import them into PersistIQ campaigns, find accurate email addresses for some of the leads, fill in missing data, update her CRM, check for and remove duplicate contacts, and a few other repetitive admin-like tasks.

So, in uncovering this problem, Joyce saw an opportunity. She knew that if she could find a way to reduce the time she spent on data entry, she’d be able to close more deals. And not only that… she would also have more time to think about improving her sales strategy and her sales pitch, which would further improve her results.

AFTER: Joyce optimized her lead generation process to double her team's sales.

This experiment of hers led her team to more than double their sales from outbound by simplifying their campaign management beyond email automation alone.

She never has to think about lead generation or lead management anymore because it’s all handled seamlessly by an app called Sona that syncs with her email outreach platform, as well as her CRM.

Sona firstly sources “easy-to-convert” leads that match Joyce’s ideal customer persona, based on a selected company size, industry, funding amount, and other granular details that most lead databases don’t have — after checking her CRM first to make sure that it never sources duplicates.

It then pushes these new prospects directly into matching email campaigns in PersistIQ on a regular basis (or any email automation platform), distributing them between sales reps.

This means that each rep saves around 10-20 hours per week each on data entry. And their sales process now starts with responding to emails from interested leads, because everything before that step is handled by Sona.

Their team easily books a steady stream of meetings every week without having to worry about where those meetings are coming from.

How much time do your sales reps spend on data entry?

If you’ve never thought to measure how much time those 5-10 minute data-entry tasks are taking up over the course of a week, you might be surprised by the results.

Sourcing leads and syncing them across all of your sales and marketing platforms is traditionally a manual and time-consuming process that decreases sales productivity and turns sales reps into part-time data entry folk.

Check out Sona to source smart leads and simplify the process of sending of personalized sales emails to each of your target personas.