Avoiding 4 Hidden Productivity Killers

What are some of the top enemies of productivity at work?

CareerBuilder recently put out a survey, which we’ll get to — just as soon as I finish this text message. Yes, most of the usual suspects are accounted for: wasting time online, social media, chatting with coworkers, and of course, cell phones and texting. Those are the obvious ones — the distractions. You can also run into hidden productivity killers, though — ones that come up in the course of just trying to do your job.

I can’t help you put the cell phone down, but let’s take a look at four of those hidden inefficiencies and how to avoid them.

1. Too Many Tools

You’ve probably at least got a customer management tool, email software, a blog platform, the backend tool for your website, and several different social media accounts to manage. Logging in and out and coordinating between them all day is a huge inefficiency — you wouldn’t carry around five different drills when you can just switch out a bit. Look into software that operates more like that, offering you several different capabilities under one umbrella.

2. The Data Swamp

With that overloaded toolbox of software comes lots of numbers, names, and metrics. You can export data from each one separately — and then spend the rest of the day battling Excel as you struggle to make sense of it all. Efficiently merged and organized data can help you tell the clearest story of your marketing efforts and ROI.

3. Trapped in the Inbox

The best-run email campaigns nurture your customers and prospects by moving them down the sales funnel based on what actions they take. But they can be difficult to keep track of — seeing who’s opened an email, clicked on a link, or responded to you can be a nightmare of searching through archives and managing databases. Email automation software can help you keep track of your contacts’ behavior more easily.

4. Poor Sales Funnel Targeting

Forget about a tree falling in the forest — if you reach a top-funnel prospect with a bottom-funnel offer, will they even bother to look? You can spend a lot of time creating quality content, but if it’s not getting to the right people, it’s not going to make an impact, and it’s a wasted effort on your part. A well thought out content plan that targets the right areas of the funnel can give your marketing efficiency a boost.

Once you’re aware of these inefficiencies, you can recognize them as they occur, and start to improve on them. Marketing automation tools can help, offering many of the solutions that we just talked about. There are quite a few out there, but we’re partial to the HubSpot platform — we’ve seen results that speak for themselves.

Interested in learning more?