One of my biggest hangups in life is that I hate redoing work. I'm honestly not sure where it comes from, but my loathing of duplication drives some interesting behavior. I won't submit a form I filled out online until I've copied all my answers. I only use software apps that save automatically and have automatic versions I can go back to just in case. Thanks Google Docs. I create templates for Everything. All of my files are online, so I can get to them anytime and anyplace. Yeah, it's pretty debatable whether this behavior is helpful or harmful, as sometimes I'm putting more time into creating the process than I would spend just doing the thing. Either way, you benefit, because it causes me to search out ways to create such things as global smart templates. Global who the what you say? Uh, let me break it down. Global. Able to use anywhere. Smart. Intelligent. Can adapt and change and pull in information. Templates. A set of text that is created for a specific purpose and can be used again and again. Alright, so now that we're on the same page, you might be wondering what this has to do with supercharging sales systems. And it all goes back to me hating to redo work and the power of consistency. When you're interacting with prospects in your sales process, you have specific communications that get sent at certain points in the process. For example, the email you send to ask a prospect to book an initial consultation. The email they get back after booking the call. The reminder emails that get sent leading up to the consultation. The follow up email you send after the call. A rebooking email in case they need to reschedule, or a referral email if they need to contact one of your partners. While writing each of these emails isn't rocket science, recreating each of these emails from scratch every time isn't the highest and best use of time and energy. Here's where templates come into play. And yes, before you even get started about personalization, of course you will likely customize the message. The point here is that you can spend 30 seconds customizing the template as opposed to 5 minutes typing it from scratch. The other benefit of templates is consistency. Using templates means that the tone and verbiage that the prospect encounters is consistent. And when changes happen in the organization, maybe a new scheduler is being used, or the days needed to create a proposal changes. That can just get updated in a template. And no one needs a memo about the new cover sheet for their TPS report. You might already be using these kind of templates. And if so, high five! But where do you keep them? There are great template solutions in Outlook and Gmail, but what if you need to send this email out of your CRM or project management system? Sure, you could have a document with all the templates, but that means finding it and copying and pasting. This is where global comes into play. Every app we use runs in a web browser. So, a browser extension that manages our templates means that we can use those templates in every software program we run. The browser extension we use to get these global templates is called TextBlaze. It's a Chrome extension that enables us to create templates that we use for consistent prospect and client communications. Now, about that smart part. The smart part of global smart templates TextBlaze not only manages templates, but allows you to use variables, auto populate dates, insert information from your clipboard, designate where the cursor ends up, and has even more functionality to intelligently adapt and modify your templates. Now, here's one example of using the clipboard insertion. In the template we created to deliver a proposal to a client, I simply copy the link to the proposal before I insert the template. And the link gets put directly in the template in the right place. In the pro or paid version of this, you can have it pull data from a table. So it could insert different appointment links based on the salesperson and type of client. Using our global smart templates in TextBlaze enables more efficient, effective, and consistent communication across all of our systems. It's especially powerful in the sales system, as it takes less time and effort to clearly connect with clients and ensure that they have the information needed to take the next step. It eliminates misunderstandings and enhances the client experience, while reducing the effort needed to create that experience. If you're interested in trying it out, go to fieryfx. com slash git dash blaze. And that's a wrap on Season 5 of Elevated. We've examined pretty much every aspect of a sales system, from why you need one, to how you use it, and even which CRM to choose. Season six planning is in the works, so stay tuned to find out what we'll be digging into next season. 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