OREANDA-NEWS. March 23, 2016. Guidebook, a fast-growing company that enables customers to build and publish mobile apps, began facing the ever-common challenge of high-growth organizations: scaling a sales team. Recently, Alan Blank, VP of Product Marketing and Business Development at Guidebook, spoke with our own Kurt Smith on an episode of App Talks to discuss how the company made their sales team far more efficient with solutions like Yesware. Below are tips on how you can save your own sales team invaluable hours.

1. Find one tool to rule them all (or as few as possible, at least)

Before Yesware, Guidebook was using three apps to handle sales processes. “We had one app to handle sales automation, one to send templated email responses to people, and one to see when people are opening emails and remind you when they have not,” Blank said.

Among the benefits of trimming down major sales processes into one app, Blank pointed to the amount of time saved by his reps no longer troubleshooting. He estimates the team was spending 100 hours per year on bugs and troubleshooting the different apps not working together. “Sales reps used to have to go back and forth between apps,” Blank said. “That many apps working together causes a huge amount of bugs.”

2. Give your sales team relevant data to eliminate fact-finding conversation

Blank and the Guidebook management team wanted visibility into how often sales reps were contacting customers and prospects. Reps knew that they needed a tool to tell them whether they were colliding on deals with other reps, or double contacting prospects. With Yesware, suddenly there was 100% data availability in Salesforce. “Instead of people only having a few tasks logged, and shaky data, we had every email conversation that anyone ever had with a customer, all logged, and completely searchable,” Blank said.

It also helped the overall interaction between Guidebook and its customers. “Instead of getting a poorly-informed sales rep calling a customer, customers now saw a unified front,” Blank said. “Reps suddenly understood all the background of the account, and talked to them with a unified front, rather than restarting conversations all the time.”

3. Simplify Your Data Processes

All of the manual data entry and troubleshooting that Guidebook’s reps were doing on a daily basis really added up. He guessed that his team saved time by moving to Yesware’s automatic email logging technology, which saves the team 175 hours per month. “Each rep now saved 15 minutes per day,” Blank said. “Across 30 reps and multiple months, that is a lot of time saved; we’re getting eight hours of selling time back per day.”

Ultimately, Blank advised avoiding convoluted data processes. “Keep it simple. You don’t get reliable data when you try to complicate processes,” he said. “Start simple, and get only what you need in terms of data.”