TextBloom, Making Sales Reps’ Lives Easier
I was 8 years into my software sales career before I even heard of text expansion, and in retrospect life would have been so much easier if I’d had the right tools. Long story short (because no one likes a long build up before the main content of a post): I couldn’t find one that did exactly what I wanted so I built one, and here are some specific use cases that make sales reps’ lives much easier!
- Quickly Provide Correct Information, Links, Etc.
- Stop Misspelling… Everything!
- Create Easily Used Email Templates
- Effortlessly Work With Lists Of Content
- Include Pricing In Text Expansions
1. Quickly Provide Correct Information, Links, Etc.
As an Account Executive, I was constantly sending current and prospective customers a ton of product-specific information, including product information, installation documentation, and case studies. All of this content needed to be specific to the recipient’s use case, which resulted in me trying (unsuccessfully) to bookmark every single bit of content and finding the correct links for each email recipient.
So what’s the solution?
Text Expansion!
With TextBloom, saving various collections of content and including them in emails is a breeze.
Step 1: Save Your Expansions
Step 2: Trigger The Correct Expansion
2. Stop Misspelling… Everything!
This one is pretty obvious, but if you find yourself typing content over and over again your chances of misspelling/mistyping are pretty high. As an Account Executive who was constantly typing out my contact information, I’m ashamed to say that while I never forgot how to spell my own name I have accidentally hit the wrong key with the result being that I’ve sent the wrong information to prospective customers.
The obvious solution here is to use TextBloom to save your email address, phone number, and anything else that you type frequently to ensure it’s spelled correctly every single time.
3. Create Easily Used Email Templates
I know there’s no shortage of comprehensive email campaign software out there, giving you the ability to create series of emails that you can send to recipient lists. And those are great when you need a robust email campaign, TextBloom isn’t built to replace that functionality. But what about those times when you need to reuse an email template and your use case doesn’t require such a complicated setup?
My favorite use case that I had in mind when building TextBloom was when I would send an introduction for a newly acquired customer to their newly assigned Customer Success rep shortly after earning their business. I didn’t need to set up a complex email campaign for them; rather, I just needed to send an email that:
– Let me type in customer name and the customer’s business name
– Let me select from the Customer Success reps
– Gave me a list of the products we sold to choose from
– Allowed me to include the days from today at which I would circle back to check in
With TextBoom’s Form Expansions, you can quickly create a template that includes both manual text input and a selection of predefined options.
Here’s a look at the CS Intro Form Expansion I created:
And here’s the Form Expansion in action:
4. Effortlessly Work With Lists Of Content
One of the many benefits I’ve found with creating my own text expansion and clipboard manager application is that I can build it to handle very specific use cases for my own personal benefit, and the functionality I’m about to cover may be something you never need and it’s highly likely you’ve never thought about before: automatically breaking up copied content into separate clipboard items.
Imagine you’ve just received a spreadsheet full of email addresses and you need to reach out to each person individually. You can have the spreadsheet open along with your email client, toggling back and forth between windows as you copy each item individually. In theory this isn’t terribly annoying, but in practice? In practice I hate it. And even with a typical clipboard manager that can save a history of clipboard content, I would still have to copy each email address individually.
“But wait,” you say. “There must be a better way!”
And you’re right to say this.
Allow me to introduce you to Breaker Mode on TextBloom.
With Breaker Mode enabled, you can copy an entire spreadsheet column, a list of text in Word, Google docs, etc, or from anywhere else, and that content is automatically broken down into individual bits of content that you can use! I feel as though this is something better shown that described. In the example video directly below, I’m selecting all contacts in the spreadsheet column and copying them (Command + C). Once I return to my email tab, I can quickly find my clipboard history by holding down Command and Shift and pressing either the left or right arrow key. This presents a pop up with my clipboard history, and when I click on any of the items, the pop up window disappears and immediately pastes the content.
But let’s say you know you only need to use these emails exactly one time. This is when you would use the paste and pop feature. If you hold Command and Shift and press the up arrow, you will paste the oldest item in your clipboard manager and you will be removing it from your clipboard manager at the same time. You can also paste and pop the most recent item by pressing the down arrow instead of the up arrow (remember to hold down Command and Shift!).
5. Include Pricing In Text Expansions
I’ve sold various software solutions for a decade, and pricing strategies have never remained constant. Sometimes the price would be completely custom, but other times the price would be based on a per-user basis. I’ve sold software on a per-user basis where the price per user is constant (the same price for each user) but that price changes based on the number of users, and I’ve also sold software with truly tiered pricing (the first x users are one price, the additional users above x up until y are another price, and the users beyond that are yet another price). The good news is that you can use TextBloom to handle both of the per-user pricing models!
If the price is a standard price-per-user (starting with up to 9 users is 29.99/user/month, starting with 29 users is 19.99/user/month, etc.), you can simply use built-in shortcuts to do the math for you. Using the example in the sentence above, you coudl type the following for 29 users:
:mul(29, 19.99)
And yes, you can also use the :add, :sub, and :div prefixes!
But what about the truly tiered pricing models? This is where TextBloom’s Tiered Pricing Expansions is going to save the day! Let’s start by creating a new Tiered Pricing Expansion, seen here:
In this example, I’ve created an expansion that includes the tiered pricing at the bottom and the output text, including both the original number and the calculated result. Now let’s look at how I call this when needed, let’s say for 25 users:
This specific functionality is truly why I built TextBloom. I was sick of having to reference a pricing calculator and I wanted to be able to incorporate the dynamically calculated pricing within a template, so I built a tool to do just that!
Conclusion
In conclusion, text expansion and clipboard management are two very powerful tools for sales reps, and I hope by now you realize how much more efficient you can be with the proper tools!