So say the results of a recent University of Utah study in which 310 undergrads described their multitasking habits and then took a test to measure their multitasking abilities. The results were surprising. As David Strayer and his colleagues found out, the people who considered themselves the best multitaskers did the worst in practice—perception had a negative correlation with performance.

The question, then, is why.

Only so much bandwidth

Think back on the last time you were multitasking–if you’re not doing it now–at your desk or in your car. Whether you were flipping between Word docs, social networks, and email or pretending that you could text and drive, all that processing saps your brain power, in a way that makes you begin to lose awareness of the thing(s) you’re doing.

“When you start to multitask,” Strayer says, ‘you’re diverting attention from your own ability to self monitor, to even just notice ‘hey, you’re not staying in your lane,’ ‘hey, people are honking at you.’”

Or hey, you’re not reading through your emails before you send them. Psychologists have a fancy word for knowing what you’re doing—metacognitive awareness—and multitasking diminishes it. ”That’s part of why you get this overconfidence,” Strayer says, “because the very act of multitasking impairs your own ability to notice that you’re just not very good at it.”

Switching has an unseen cost

Let’s go back to the computer screen for a little thought experiment of our own. As you juggle between three or four applications, each program has its own set of rules, as well as a set of goals for what you’re trying to do with it. So you could say that the program isn’t just happening in the computer’s processing center, but your own–and so each time you switch between programs, you have to reload the task in your mind as well. Strayer calls this an “invisible overhead,” one that accrues with every time you make a switch between tasks. In this way, multitasking is a kind of interrupted thinking, one with costs that have been studied across professions.

Nurses are often forced to multitask, Strayer says. Between programming infusion pumps, answering to physicians, attending to patients, and answering to alarms, they then return to their original task, but may lose their place or, worse, skip a step. As well, the audio records of plane crashes indicate that pilots were interrupted midsequence, leading to an overlooking of key tasks.

Strayer and his colleagues have found that lots of multitasking can fatigue the frontal portions of the brain, inhibiting creativity. That finding aligns with intuitive wisdom: if you’re tackling a big problem, give it your undivided attention.

Getting into focus

“If you have some kind of orderly structure to your life where you’re not constantly switching from one task to the next to the next,” Stayer says, “you’re probably going to see more creative, thoughtful, quality product.”

Being that we can’t exactly command the world to be more orderly, we can impose some structure on the technological messiness. In addition, Strayer recommends setting your email to deliver every 30 or 60 minutes, though 15 might be more suiting for a salesperson. Regardless, the takeway is this: instead of reacting to every piece of electronic stimuli that comes your way–and thus eroding your ability to do quality work–move through your tasks methodically.

Then you can be confident of your quality. And doesn’t your prospect or customer deserve 100% of your attention?

By pulling the message taut. In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White contend that in vigorous writing, a sentence “should contain no unnecessary words,” for the same reason that a “machine should contain no unnecessary parts.” A recent study suggests that brevity works for email, too.

Conducted by Sinan Aral of NYU, Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT, and Marshall W. Van Alstyne of Boston University, the paper is based on data culled from five years of emails in an executive recruiting firm. The key takeaway: the shorter your email, the quicker the response time, and the higher your productivity.

Why keeping messages short works

Aral says that brief emails tend to yield shorter turnaround response times. He credits this to the processing time that longer message require: when he personally receives a long message, he puts it off until he can sit down and parse it, which, of course, leads to delays.

To avoid a workflow holdup, you’ll need to be precise, says coauthor Marshall W. Van Alstyne. “If the purpose of your message is to convey information or request information,” he says, “make sure you’re immediately setting context and get straight into the point.”

Specificity has dual positives: receivers can process more quickly, shortening the time between query and reply, avoiding the distraction, loss of context or added task juggling that comes with time lag.

How do you learn to write short emails?

“It could be that short emails come when the recipient of the email already has a context for the conversation,” Aral says, “You already know what this is about, I already know what you expect.”

This points to the importance of understanding the relationship between the medium and the message, Aral says. If you need to have a high-bandwidth back-and-forth with someone, phone or video chat can be more efficient than email. “Knowing which channel is appropriate includes knowing which channel is best for information,” he says, “but also what’s appropriate given your relationship to the person or the purpose of conversation.”

What’s the right length?

“Twitter length is probably just about right in terms of making a request and getting a response back promptly,” says Van Alstyne. His tip: write a few sentences to set the context of the message and then immediately follow with an action item, making for a much more readily consumable message than burying the task in the third or fourth paragraph.

Still, there’s much more to get the message right–and read–with vigor. Here are three tips to keep your messages crisp.

1. Go for the scan. “Books are read,” business writing professor David Silverman blogs over at HBR. “Business documents are scanned.” Guide the reader to important info: easy-to-read titles, headings, and bulleted lists make the reader’s job easier.

2. Be brief. Both Lifehacker and Zen Habits endorse five.sentenc.es, a personal policy to keep messages brief (falling well within Van Alstyne’s prescriptions). Some of you might be aware of the similar Basho email approach. The idea is is to cap emails in the same was SMS and Twitter are capped—but instead of limiting on characters, count the sentences. This will keep your message trim.

3. Make each word work. Over at the Purdue Online Writing Lab, contributors Ryan Weber and Nick Hurm take a hard line: “Words and phrases should be deliberately chosen for the work they are doing,” they write. “Like bad employees, words that don’t accomplish enough should be fired. When only the most effective words remain, writing will be far more concise and readable.”

And that, of course, will also make them much easier for your reader to act on.

Many of us might be sales professionals, but we’re really relationship experts.

In our first #SalesInsiders Twitter Chat, hosted earlier today by SalesLoft, The BridgeGroup Inc, and Yesware, we couldn’t help but notice that the questions we got—even those about making goals and evaluating your pipeline—mostly kept a keen focus on the customer.

We’re happy to see that. Because making sure that you’re adding value to your customers, that you’re helping them stay competitive and relevant in an increasingly cutthroat market, is what separates you from your competition.

We know that some of you couldn’t join us on our Twitter Chat. But to keep you in fighting shape, here’s a highlight of the lively conversation:

Q: What free sales tech tools do you use?

• A: @SalesLoft uses Newsle, Indeed, Yesware, Nutshell Mail, as does @bridgegroupinc. @Yesware loves @Asana and @Evernote—who just Tuesday launched Evernote Business

Q: How do you re-engage old prospect to turn a “no” into a “yes”?

• A: @PAubry had this great advice: You have to re engage old marketing leads with valuable content. Gain their trust back
• @b2bCamp offered: Nurture them w/ great content & reach out to them with relevant sales triggers
• I love combining these two pieces of advice. To me, trust is key in any relationship. And adding value turns that key. Whenever you offer genuine assistance you’ll be surprised by how much goodwill you generate
• @bridgegroupinc adds that it’s not necessarily a particular person, but the company that is your lead. Don’t give up just because a particular person (unless it’s the CEO) said no. If the chief turned you down, find a different tactic and respectfully try to re-engage

Q: How do you analyze your current pipeline to set yourself up for closing more deals before the quarter ends?

• A: @bridgegroupinc: Use yr execs to call execs to get a deeper sense of the deal &what can be done to close it by yr end. Ask & ye shall receive.
• @johngeads had an often overlooked point: Understand if they have the ability to buy and what evaluation criteria they will use to make a decision
• @mbellows offered: Ruthlessly trim your pipeline (esp. at year end) so you only work on deals that really move the needle
• @bridgegroupinc suggested this method of analyzing your pipeline: Look at your pipeline & grade each opp on a scale of 1-4 w/4 being close by yr end. Focus on the 3s and 4s only

Always go into any prospecting situation prepared. Research the company you’re propositioning, answer why you’re relevant to them, what pain you solve, and why you stand out from your competitors. This may all sound basic, but you’d be surprised how many salespeople fail to do this first step. Always assume that as prepared as you are, you don’t fully know what their decision-making process is—and that there will be stumbles and obstacles along the way, says Trish Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group Inc. “Review & Redo,” is one of her mottos.  Ask direct questions and don’t forget to listen. That’s what we’re here for. Until next time, see you in the Twittersphere #SalesInsiders.

Chandler Quintin wants to be more than friends with Facebook. As Partner and Director of Accounts at a boutique Boston digital media & events experience firm One Mighty Roar, Chandler is pursuing the social network as a client. And his trusted partner is Yesware.

“For a startup like us, getting a meeting with Facebook is a huge moment,” he told me when we met earlier this month to chat about his approach to closing deals. “I say that what led to us being in that meeting with the Facebook rep was the Chain of Yesware.”

Chandler, who besides being an entrepreneur, executive at OMR also teaches MBA level Entrepreneurship and digital marketing, needs proven sales tools that get results. He heard of Yesware last year when the team hired their first salesperson. “I didn’t realize how insightful it would be until we started actually using it to capture leads and we were landing more jobs.”   

But it’s not just about booking an event. That fateful first meeting with Facebook actually started as a cold email Chandler sent to an agency in Boston to introduce himself. “After I saw that my prospect opened my email a couple of times, I decided to reach out to him on Twitter. We ended up connecting, having a great dinner, and starting to check in regularly. “

About a year into their friendship, his friend introduced Chandler to one of his clients who has a product that complements one of OMR’s offerings. A collaboration ensued, and since this client already had Facebook on their roster, OMR saw an opportunity to reach out. They crafted an intro together and sent out the email. Using tracking, Chandler noticed that his email was being opened multiple times, at different Facebook locations. “I calculated a good follow-up time and was able to get a demo meeting with Facebook.”

While OMR is waiting to hear back from Zuckerberg Inc., they’re hard at work on other projects and note that they use Yesware as a project management tool as well. Whether they’re bidding on a project, sending deliverables, or ensuring that they’re adhering to a schedule, Chandler and team use Yesware’s popular email tracking feature as a project management tool.

“We used Yesware to bid on, manage and close the Essence Music Festival. That project had a seven-month lead time before we signed a contract, so you can imagine the intricacies involved,” he says. “Once that project kicked off we continued to use Yesware religiously to make sure that every deliverable was being looked at accordingly. So if someone didn’t open up their deliverable due Friday, I’d remember that by end of day Friday I should send them a reminder to ‘please open the deliverable.’ Yesware carried us through the project, the follow-ups, the analytics.”

The event went off without a hitch and Essence was so happy with Chandler’s team that they’ve already met with OMR to discuss the 2013 festival plans.

Speaking of 2013, OMR has big plans for the coming year. First, there’s a big move from Cambridge to downtown Boston. And it’s for a great reason: the startup is growing. Having started with four people, OMR expanded to eight and now they’ve hired a handful more. For the self-funded team, reaching this level of growth is a huge milestone. “We’re really excited to expand our team,” says Chandler.

As to the rest of his plans, he smiles, noting that “we’re working on some really big clients,” Facebook potentially among them. “We’re looking forward to being smarter in how we communicate to achieve those goals. We’re leveraging our technology and using tools like Yesware has given us an edge.”

Chandler explains that for his sales team, and even for him, it’s been a good gauge of confidence—and a test of whether people connect with his product. “When you’re sending out proposals and you don’t hear back, 9 times out of 10, it’s a negative thing. But sometimes you’re not hearing back because the person works at Facebook and they’re busy because they get thousands of emails a day. So if you see that they’re opening your emails multiple times, you know that there’s an interest there. So you use Yesware and your intuition and you go forward.”
 
Do you have what it takes to be our Rainmaker of the Month? Tweet us with #FollowYes and we’ll be in touch!

However, tools have changed. What used to be strictly face-to-face interaction turned to phone, then fax. Now a combination of emails, tweets, LinkedIn updates, data scraping, and much more are part of the sales equation.

Enter #SalesInsiders.

Experts from The Bridge Group Inc., Yesware, and SalesLoft, are starting a bi-monthly gathering on Twitter with the hashtag #SalesInsiders.

For 30 minutes on December 6th at 2:00 p.m. EST, us and many of our friends will be discussing on Twitter: “How To Close 2012 Out With a Bang!”

During the time, we’ll focus on three main questions:

• Are you 100% sure that you know the decision making process for every deal? If not, what do you do?  #SalesInsiders
• What free sales technology can you use right now to end 2012 with a bang? #SalesInsiders
• How do you analyze your current pipeline to set yourself up for success and closing more deals before the quarter ends? #SalesInsiders

We hope you’ll get on Twitter during this time and contribute to the conversation (highly recommended). Search the term: #SalesInsiders

We started Yesware in 2010 with a simple premise: Unleash the power of email to close more deals faster, and to make more money. As such, we set out to empower salespeople with a productivity tool that can let them focus on what they do best—build relationships, manage their pipelines, reach and exceed their sales goals. We thought back then that we had a strong value proposition we were unsure about how the sales community would react to us. We now have that answer.

Over the weekend we passed a significant milestone: We signed our 100,000^th user. As we celebrate that landmark, we wanted to tell you a little bit about where we’ve been and where we’re going.

When we first came up with the concept for Yesware we thought back to our own experiences as salespeople. What frustrated us? Where had we gotten stuck? Why exactly did deals fall apart?

Ultimately, we kept coming back to this: How could we optimize our tech tools so that stronger connections with prospects were possible? The solution: Find a way to convert business leads into actual clients in a way that would enable long-lasting relationships. 

What we soon realized was that there is an untapped resource in email. We realized that by tracking messages when prospecting and by knowing which links resonated with customers, by creating custom templates that could be used again and again, and by synching to CRMs, we could create a significant competitive advantage.  Adding on specialized reports and analytics meant that salespeople could save significant time and get valuable insights into how their messages were being read—and where they were going.  

But we’re not just another automated tech startup in Boston. What was an essential to the success of our business model was remembering that people are selling the products. The only time a robot—or machine—sells you something is online. And by then you already know what you want.

As Yesware, we keep the human connection top of mind. So by optimizing your mailbox, we make sure that our sales all-stars can do what you love: connect with other people around the product or service that you’re passionate about. We take care of the data, getting it to the right box in the CRM so you can worry about your customer.

And it’s because of these connections that we’re excited about our future plans. We already partner with leaders in the industry— Nimble, Netsuite, Nutshell and other services like TimeTrade, Batchbook, Pipedrive, Capsule, Highrise, SugarCRM, and Relenta— we’re about to bring you the best in CRM integrations.

Don’t use Gmail? No problem. We’re also part of the new Outlook 2013.  And we’re constantly working on new features, templates and iterations. We’re excited about our upcoming milestones and are looking forward to sharing news about our latest offerings with you soon.

And this is just the beginning. We don’t just stuff pipelines for clients; we stuff our own as well! Look for several new announcements right here on our blog over the coming few months.  We have a lot going on here at Yesware and we’re excited to have you along for the ride.

Ask most salespeople why they don’t use their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System and they’re likely to say that it’s too clunky, they don’t have the time, and they don’t see the value in it. But those of us who use a CRM—especially a social CRM like Batchbook, which helps us listen to what our community is saying and collaborate with our team to provide better service—know that it can help us increase productivity by 32%.

Social Selling Is Here

Business is quickly moving to a social selling model. And fueling the social revolution in sales is a trust revolution. The traditional sales funnel has undergone a transformation. Instead of dealing in information asymmetry, where the salesperson had the upper hand and it was up to him to educate his consumer, it is now the educated consumer (thanks to the Internet and social networks) who often can educate the sales rep. She comes to him with her mind mostly made up, needing that final bit of information—or reassurance—before signing on the dotted line.

More Data Than Ever

The next phase of the sales process is the data collection, and at any given sales cycle, a lot of data is generated. It seems that these days everyone is enamored with the concept of Big Data. But as much as CMOs and Sales VPs embrace the numbers and qualitative entries, the question remains: What now? How do you turn all this stuff in the customer database into actionable knowledge?

Yesware CEO Matthew Bellows is fond of talking about the human evolution of sales. Instead of being overwhelmed by data, salespeople should go back to basics and remember that they’re human. Technology has led to a wonderful change in our behavior: Salespeople who are truly passionate about their craft can actually become better at it thanks to tools like Yesware and Batchbook.

Instead of worrying about noting every detail of the customer transaction into different fields of their CRM, they can just type out a regular email to their prospect or contact. Yesware and Batchbook take care of recording the important data from the body of your message to the CRM. By removing the burden of data entry, sales staffs can focus on one-to-one interactions. They can drop the monotonous exchanges that teams sometimes fall victim to when looking at an empty CRM sheet. “The only time a robot sells is online. Don’t be a robot,” Matthew says when he talks about salespeople.

Organize Data Around Human Touch

We’re all looking to save time and money and to expand—all while doing more with less. Getting our sales staffs on board with our CRM strategy is key, especially since a recent study by Nucleus Research found that 80% of companies are not reaping the true rewards of their CRM.

So how do we get the whole team using CRM? Start by making sure your company has a clear plan around integration, extension and collaboration. There’s no doubt that incorporating a social solution, especially a social CRM, is essential to success. A recent study of 1,709 CEOs conducted by IBM noted that they think social is the most important way to connect with their customers. Approximately 70% of all companies now use social to interact either with their customers or vendors. McKinsey & Co. pegs the social sector at adding $1.3 trillion to the global economy, and it is growing at a rate of 47% year-over-year according to IDC.

This all points to how important maintaining that human touch truly is. Even though we all flock to our computers to get support, to share a customer success story and to vent, what we’re really seeking is to connect with that person at the other end. By learning how to harness the data you collect from your sales tools and plug-ins, you can make a deeper connection with your customer. One that will lead to a longer-lasting relationship, and that’s what we’re ultimately after. Not just the deal, but the relationship. Because business deals aren’t done between companies. They’re done between people.

This post originally appeared on the Batchook blog. To learn more about Yesware’s integration with Batchbook, click here.

By Bradford Shimp, Batchbook

If there is a conflict between salespeople and CRM software, it is likely because of a little devil called data entry. No one wants to fill out paperwork, and if a CRM is just about collecting data, it is a tough sell to sales reps. But with new tools like social CRM, it is time for a truce.

Having pounded the pavement myself for a few years, I understand the hesitance amongst salespeople to use a CRM. It’s not because those of you in sales aren’t team players or because you are trying to avoid work. The fact is, sales is a highly personal pursuit, all about building good relationships and walking people through the steps of the sale. Having to stop and take notes about every conversation can be highly disruptive and it may actually hurt your sales effectiveness.

At the same time, collecting customer data and “taking notes” is extremely important. Keeping good records and seeing a history of a customer relationship all in one place can improve sales and customer satisfaction.

So how do we resolve the divide between what we want and what we need? What we’re seeking is a solution that allows you to maintain the human touch, while making it dead simple to collect vital customer information. That is where a new breed of customer relationship management software, called social CRM, comes in.

Social CRM solutions, such as Batchbook, put more focus on customer interactions. This includes social media, which is growing in importance for sales reps, as well as more traditional forms of communication such as phone calls and emails, which is where Yesware comes in.

Email likely makes up the majority of your customer communications. With all the back and forth, it can be time consuming to record important information from multiple conversations. With social CRM, you can easily capture email threads and record them into your customer database as a conversation history.

By automatically collecting this conversation history, you can collect a ton of customer data that is not just useful to you as a salesperson, but also to everyone else on your team—from the folks who are filling orders to those in customer service.

The best part is, you don’t have to interrupt your own workflow to do this. You can use tools like Yesware to streamline your email communications (with cool features like tracking, templates, and pipeline management) and Batchbook to record the emails and create new contacts based on email header info. You can select which emails to record to Batchbook by clicking the handy CRM button in Yesware.

Technology can be a sales person’s best friend. A social CRM can help you build relationships with customers. When needed, any team member can take a look at a history of communications, important customer details, and current information about a customer, like what they are talking about on Twitter.

No more excuses. Let technology do what it does best: In this case streamlining the process of data entry for important customer communications. Social CRM is a tool that can really help you in sales by collecting important information and making it available to you when you need it. This helps you do what you do best, talking to the right people and providing the human touch that gets the sale for your business.

Bradford Shimp works at Batchbook, a social CRM built for small businesses. 

The fourth quarter is the toughest one of the year. Whether you’re the CMO, VP Sales, the top salesperson, the mid salesperson or the one coming up from behind, every passing day brings you closer to the end—and that’s not necessarily a deadline you’re looking forward to.

But you’re goal-oriented, otherwise you’d likely be in another profession. So how are you going to tackle closing out the year on a high note?

• Assess your situation. How many deals do you currently have in your pipeline? Where do they stand? How many are just about closed? How far away are you from your goal? You can’t diagnose your situation before you take a critical look at where you are.
• Analyze yourself. You’ve been working at this for at least 3 quarters. What techniques have worked for you and which haven’t? It’s time to throw out the non-performers and go straight for the winners. If you’re out of plays, go back to the drawing board, get in touch with your inner customer and ask yourself “what is it about this product that would sell me?” Then test it out on the most cynical of your friends.
• Work backwards. If you know that your typical sales cycle takes 3-6 weeks, get a meeting on the books NOW. Don’t wait until the first week of December to start with a new prospect in your pipeline, hoping that you’re going to close them in record time. Now that you know exactly how many deals you are away from your goal, you know how many meetings you need to set up. Consider the 20:6:3:1 rule. For 20 meetings you set up you’ll get 6 follow-ups, which will lead to 3 serious leads and 1 deal.
• Maximize your prospects. Don’t waste time on the wrong customers. Every time you speak with a potential lead they’re giving you a valuable asset—their time, says Andy Paul, author of Zero-Time Selling. Prove to them that you’re worthy of their precious time by disseminating valuable and actionable information in a succinct fashion. Treat every prospective sale as a zero-sum game: You either won it or you lost it. Move on as quickly as possible to close as many prospects as you can. But remember to stay personable. This isn’t just a transaction, this is relationship-building, so that next quarter you won’t have to scramble.
• Rope in your early adopters. There’s no better advocate for your product than a client who becomes a brand ambassador. Your early adopters tend to be huge fans and will gladly spread the word on your behalf. Let them! Whether it’s in a press release, in a blog post, or in a customer testimonial on your marketing website, use their enthusiasm to augment your sales efforts.

Most importantly, stay focused on the end-goal. You want to make your numbers, but you want to do so in a way that maintains your integrity, fuels your passion for the product and keeps the customer front and center. When you keep those three core tenants in mind, the numbers will follow.

Do you have best-practices for year-end selling? Share them in the comments below.