| Fire off your go-to emails with a hotkey, text prospects from your PC through your own Android phone, and turn a stack of business cards into contacts. | | You know the drill. Pipeline review is Monday at 9. You’ve got 60 dials to hit, a demo at 11, three proposals to send, and your manager wants every activity logged in the CRM by end of day. So what eats the day? Typing the same follow-up email for the 14th time. Copying a prospect’s title off LinkedIn, then their phone number, then their company. Hunting for the mute button with a VP on the line. Retyping business cards from last week’s trade show. 😩 None of that is selling. It’s busywork, and it’s eating the time you should be spending on the phone and in front of buyers. Sound familiar? ❓ Here’s the thing: Salesforce, HubSpot, your sequencer and LinkedIn aren’t the problem. It’s all the little stuff you do around them, by hand, over and over. That’s exactly the kind of work a computer should be doing for you. So below are the tools I’d hand any rep, SDR or AE, most helpful first. Some run on your Windows PC, some run right in your browser (handy if IT has your laptop locked down). None of them need you to learn anything techy. Click Learn more on any one for the full rundown. Now on with the show… 😃 | | Emails, InMails and Recaps: Type It Once ✍️ | Your best follow-up email, your meeting recap, your answer to “just send me some info.” You already wrote them. Stop writing them again. | | Tool | What it does for you | Prompt Assistant
Learn more → | Your whole library of canned emails, call openers, objection replies and LinkedIn messages, organized in folders and dropped in with a hotkey, a short typed abbreviation or a right-click menu. Works in Outlook, Gmail, LinkedIn, your CRM notes box, anywhere you type. | SimpleTextSender
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Quick menu version → | Only need a dozen snippets? Keep your go-to lines (your calendar link, your recap template, your “bumping this to the top of your inbox” note) in one small list and paste any of them into the active window from a menu. | Clip History
Learn more → | Keeps a history of everything you copy, with the time and the window you copied it from. Copied a prospect’s title, then their phone number, then their company? Get all three back, not just the last one. | AutoSuggester
Learn more → | Suggests words as you type, with fuzzy matching, so the long product names, company names and competitor names you type all day pop up after a few letters. It can suggest recent files too. | Spell Check
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Autocorrect version → | Fixes common misspellings as you type in every Windows program, including the ones with no spell check of their own. Over 4,000 common typos covered. No more “teh” in the email to the CFO. | ScoreMyCopy
Learn more → | Paste a headline, like your cold email subject line or your LinkedIn headline, describe who you’re selling to, and get a score out of 100 based on the classic direct-response copywriters. Then let Auto Improve rewrite it until it hits your target score. | Outlook Hotkeys Cheat Sheet
Learn more → | 35 built-in Outlook shortcuts, as a sortable spreadsheet and a printable PDF. Tape it next to your monitor for your next email block. |
| | Tip: Start with Prompt Assistant and your five most-typed emails. Give each one a short abbreviation. Once those are in muscle memory, add your objection replies. 😊 |
| | Follow-Up and Pipeline: Speed to Lead 📱 | The rep who follows up first, and keeps following up, usually wins. These make it easy to be that rep, even in a crazy week. | | Tool | What it does for you | Phone Link SMS
Learn more → | Send personal texts to a list from your PC, through your own Android phone and Microsoft’s Phone Link app. Texts come from YOUR number, so when a prospect replies, they’re replying to you. (Android only. Text people who gave you their number, and follow your company’s texting policy.) | CardSnap
Try it → | Back from a conference with a pocket full of business cards? Snap a photo of each and get the name, company, phone and email as text, ready to paste into Salesforce or HubSpot. | RemindMe
Learn more → | Mid-call and the prospect says “call me back Thursday at 2”? Hit Ctrl+Alt+R, type it, done. The reminder comes as an email (scheduled on a server, so it shows up even if your laptop is shut) or a pop-up on your PC. Or both. | DripCampaign
Try it → | For solo reps, agency owners and small teams without a marketing department: someone signs up, and your follow-up emails go out on their own, on schedule. Your nurture keeps working while you’re on a demo. | VoiceToDo
Try it → | Walking out of a customer visit? Say what you need to do (send the proposal to Dana, update the close date, order more samples) and get a tidy to-do list back. | MailMergeDocs
Try it → | One Word template plus your account spreadsheet equals a folder of personalized PDFs. Quote letters, account review summaries, “thanks for stopping by our booth” letters, each with the right name and company. | Get Dropbox Link
Learn more → | Select a file or folder in Windows Explorer, press Ctrl+F1, and the Dropbox share link is on your clipboard. Send the deck, the case study or the demo recording as a link instead of an attachment that bounces off the prospect’s email filter. |
| | Tip: Trade show this week? Put a QR Actions code on the booth that saves your contact card, snap every business card with CardSnap that night, and send a personal text the next morning with Phone Link SMS. That’s same-week follow-up, done before most people unpack. ⚡ |
| | Discovery Calls and Demos: Look Sharp Live 🎥 | | Tool | What it does for you | ZoomGlanceBar
Learn more → | Four big color-coded bars at the top of your screen: mic live, camera on, screen shared, and (if you’re hosting) recording. Alt-tab to your deck or the CRM mid-demo and you still know whether the buyer can hear you, and whether that “off the record” comment is actually on the record. | Mouse Spotlight
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Highlighter version → | Dims your screen and puts a circle of light around your cursor, so on a demo every eye goes exactly where you’re pointing: the pricing line, the dashboard, the button you want them to remember. One hotkey turns it on. | Zoom, Teams and GoToMeeting Hotkeys
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Teams version →
GoToMeeting version → | Mute, unmute and share from the keyboard instead of hunting for the button while the VP of Operations watches. Cheat sheets for Zoom (31 shortcuts), Teams (38) and GoToMeeting (14), each as a spreadsheet and a printable PDF. | PowerPoint and Google Slides Hotkeys
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Google Slides version → | 43 PowerPoint shortcuts (and 34 for Google Slides) for building the pitch deck faster and moving through it cleanly on a live call. |
| | Trade Shows, LinkedIn and the Expense Report 🧾 | | Tool | What it does for you | QR Actions
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Browser version → | QR codes that DO something. Put one on the booth sign or the leave-behind that saves your contact card, one that drafts an email to you (“send me the pricing sheet”), and one that adds the follow-up meeting to their calendar. | Noticeable Text
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Browser version → | LinkedIn won’t let you bold a word in a post or your headline. This turns text into bold, script and other styles and puts it on your clipboard, ready to paste. Use it for a word or two (screen readers stumble over styled text) and your post stands out in the feed. | ReceiptSnap
Try it → | Photograph the client lunch receipt in the parking lot and get the amounts pulled out for you. The Friday afternoon expense report gets a lot shorter. |
| One thing I’ve learned: you don’t need to automate your whole sales process this week. Pick ONE thing on this list that bugs you every single day. Fix that. Then pick the next one. If one of these gives you back 20 minutes a day, that’s well over an hour and a half a week. That’s another power hour of dials, or getting home before dinner. That’s the real FREEDOM. How about you? What’s the one thing you type or copy by hand 20 times a day that you’d love to never touch again? Drop me a note and tell me. I read every one. | | See All Our Tools | | the-Automator.com • Windows automation tools that give you your time back |
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