Even though weâre a marketing and sales automation company, weâve never encouraged people to âautomate everything!â Thatâs because the goal of automation isnât eliminating human contact. Thatâs usually not whatâs best for customers and, by extension, companies.
Human touch is important. It will always be important. And, it actually becomes more and more impactful as companies pursue automation to cut costs. The more rare human interaction with a company becomes, the more your company stands out for its one-to-one communication.
Human contact at important moments can motivate a purchase decision, but thatâs just the beginning. It can also create fiercely loyal, repeat customer who evangelize your company and product. Phone time and hand-typed emails can be a strong differentiating factor and the key to your companyâs viral growth.
But human time and attention is expensive. Most companies â whether theyâre one-man operations or enterprises â canât afford to invest it in every relationship and thatâs why automation is needed, if not critical. The trick, then, is strategically balancing automation and human touch to best serve the needs of the customer and company simultaneously.
To find this perfect balance, to know when to use what, youâll need to understand what automation is really, really good atâŚ
Humans versus machines
Automationâs biggest strength is that it can do something humans canât â it can sift through nearly unlimited amounts of real-time data and then instantly react to key events. It can respond to your contactâs behavior and trigger processes⌠messages can be sent, deal records can be created, tasks can be assigned, people can be alerted, webhooks can be sent, and more. This ability to âlistenâ and quickly âreactâ makes automation uniquely well-suited for notifying someone in your company that human touch is needed. It can connect two people at the perfect moment.
Another of automationâs strengths is efficiently handling the tedious and time-consuming task of managing and organizing the important data associated with an opportunity. It can aggregate massive amounts of data, pull the needed information, and then organize it into a contact or deal record a human can review prior to contacting someone so that they can have a productive and helpful interaction.
It can also help with managing the massive amount of tasks associated with a sales teamâs outreach. Sales involves keeping an enormous amount of balls in the air and sales automation allows you to keep any of those balls from dropping. Done well, sales automation is about creating automated processes that humans can rely on to bring them into the loop when theyâre needed so they can stay focused on helpful conversations with prospective customers. A human can be notified they need to complete a task and when the task is complete automation can take back over. It can then bring them back to the opportunity when theyâre needed.
The benefit of having an automated CRM tied to your marketing automation and email marketing solution is that a wide variety of data from the marketing process can be leveraged to inform and organize the sales process. Automation gives you the tools to spot buying signals, react quickly, and get up to speed prior to connecting so you can have the most positive interaction possible.
Automationâs weakness is that it doesnât âthinkâ (not yet, anyway), but it is great at âlisteningâ and âreacting.â Leveraging automation then is about configuring your automation to âlistenâ to whatâs important.