Saving time is simply a matter of doing more with the resources you already have. Too often, sales and marketing professionals try to take on more than they can reasonably handle in order to push themselves to achieve greater efficiency. The results are usually less than stellar.

The great news is that you can improve sales efficiency by learning from the mistakes (and wisdom) of others. Start cutting the fat without cutting corners. Below are three suggestions that will help you become more productive using sales and marketing technology with only the time and resources currently available to you.

3 Rules for Saving Time with Content

1. Personalize - Use existing marketing assets and personalize them for your ideal customer or target segment. Bring marketing and sales into alignment by focusing on the customer experience. What does it look like from their perspective? What do they really need from your business?

2. Re-purpose - Take a look at your corporate social media posts and identify recycling opportunities. Repurposing existing content accomplishes two things: it reinforces critical brand messaging and saves you time in maintaining your social media presence. For example, pull tweets from white papers. Run social media surveys based on questions in blogs. Collect stats and graphs from posts and create a webinar. You'll reach new audiences with the same information.

3. Publish - Now you know what to do, so make it official. Write up your processes and content management tips. Establish unified tool sets using marketing resource management systems. Help employees who are brand advocates streamline their processes. You'll gain the reputation as a thought leader and efficiency expert, which can't hurt your advancement options.

How to Manufacture More Time

We all have the same number of hours to accomplish our marketing objectives. Those who get ahead aren't normally the multi-taskers. The winners are the ones who eliminate unnecessary tasks and take the time to do an amazing job on the remaining tasks. "Personalize, repurpose and publish" are the three P's for a new generation. Start now and stop wasting your precious time.