Whether you're on the road making sales calls or in the office making cold calls, you probably spend more time than you like writing proposals or generating sales reports. After all, time spent on paperwork is time not spent engaging potential customers.

	TIP: You can also use the AutoText feature in Word to store and quickly insert frequently used graphic elements, such as your company logo or your signature, into documents.

So with the goal of gaining time in the field by reducing some routine sales tasks, here are four tips. They all take advantage of tools you probably already use.

1. Use Word to Save Text You'll Use Again

When you're writing proposals, responding to bid requests or crafting thank you notes to customers, you probably use the same basic text over and over again. By using the AutoText feature in Word, the word-processing software that is part of Microsoft Office Small Business Edition, you can save text you frequently use and easily insert it the next time you need it. Here's how:

1. Highlight the text you want to save.
2. Under the Insert menu on your toolbar, click AutoText and then click New. The Create AutoText dialog box will open.
3. Type a name for the text you're saving in the Please name your AutoText entry text box.
4. Click OK.

When you come across an opportunity to save time by reusing that text in another letter or proposal, here is how simple it is to do:

1. Place your cursor where you want the saved text to appear in your Word document.
2. Under the Insert menu, click AutoText and then click on the name you gave the saved text. It will immediately appear and can be quickly edited or left intact.

2. Fast-Track Reports Using Outlook with Business Contact Manager

There are all sorts of reasons people in sales use Outlook with Business Contact Manager (BCM), which is part of Microsoft Office 2003 editions. BCM automatically links business contacts, incoming and outgoing e-mail messages, notes, appointments, and tasks to the appropriate Account, Business Contact, or Opportunity record, organizing important customer information in one place.

Here's a great time-saver if you run standard sales reports. There are 20 preformatted reports in BCM that consolidate information about your accounts and opportunities to help you forecast sales, monitor performance and prioritise tasks. You can sort and filter report information to view data relevant to your particular needs. Here's how to get started generating reports using Business Contact Manager:

1. On the Business Tools menu, point to Reports, point to Accounts, Business Contacts, Opportunities, or Other.
2. Click the specific report you want to generate.

Use the Report toolbar to sort report data, modify the information displayed, or print the report.

3. Be in Two Places at Once Using Live Meeting

Have you ever scheduled a series of meetings in one location only to have an important prospect in another location suddenly want to talk to you — and right away? In situations like that, the Microsoft Office Live Meeting web conferencing service can help. You can use it anywhere you have a computer and internet access. What Live Meeting does is help you run and participate in interactive meetings with prospects or customers anywhere in the world at a moment's notice. In the Live Meeting setting you can make presentations, run sales demos, collaborate on a virtual whiteboard and ultimately negotiate deals from anywhere, saving both travel time and expense.

With the pay-per-use fee structure, pricing is based on actual usage per participant, per minute and there are no limits to the number of participants. But you can also purchase monthly or yearly subscriptions if it's a service you anticipate using frequently. Visit the Live Meeting site to learn more.

4. Get Faster Turn-Around and Follow-Up Using Pre-Built Templates

Whether you want to write a formal follow-up letter after a sales call or do a quick value analysis while you're sitting in a prospect's office, utilize pre-built templates to generate polished, professional looking documents and presentations. Here are two examples of templates that can be useful in the sales cycle:

Follow-up to product/service sales call: Reinforce the status of a sales call and suggest moving on to an evaluation of your product or service with this Word template.

Value product analysis: Chart the benefits of your product or service against the investment required with this Excel template.

Many other sales-oriented templates are available for free download from the Office Online site.