Automatización de ventas 101: Aspectos destacados de nuestra charla con Andrei Zinkevich

What sales tasks should be automated and in what way?

En pocas palabras: todo lo que no implique sus capacidades humanas únicas debe automatizarse.

Hay muchas cosas en las que los robots son mejores que nosotros, como por ejemplo:

• Recopilación de datos de correo electrónico, calendarios, teléfono, etc.
• Seguimiento de conversaciones completas
• Keeping track of all files you’ve exchanged
• Crear visibilidad entre los compañeros de equipo en las conversaciones con los clientes
• Enriquecer a las personas y las empresas con datos de acceso público
• Importar firmas de correo electrónico
• Comprobación con los clientes que van en silencio
• Seeing that you didn’t respond yet to an important email
• Detectar que un cliente interactúa mucho con usted
• Desmenuzar los datos
• Mover datos entre aplicaciones
• Y muchas, muchas otras tareas que los vendedores afrontan con regularidad.

All of these things can take up a lot of salespeople’s time, and the question is, “why?”

It’s not that these things don’t need to happen. They’re important as well, just for different reasons.

Y en algunos casos, las actividades que no generan ingresos pueden generar ingresos indirectamente.

It’s just that these are not tasks you need your unique human capabilities for. Your empathy, creativity, etc.

What tasks shouldn’t be automated?

After exploring the possibilities of sales automation, this begs the question: what shouldn’t you automate?

One way to explore this is to ask, “what is the unique skillset of a salesperson? Of a human?”

It’s certainly not managing data — or working with computers.

Lo que mejor se le da a un ser humano es tratar con otros seres humanos. Comprenderlos. Comunicarse con ellos. Ayudarles.

When automation goes too far and fails, it’s almost always when this principle is violated.

A few modern examples –

Chatbots: La tecnología para chatbots and its future applications and potential are really interesting, but the hype around them makes that people ascribe these chatbots capabilities they don’t have yet. 💬

Y eso hace que las experiencias se rompan de verdad.

Sure, chatbots can replace simple forms, but they can’t rise to the level yet of real human-to-human interaction.

Correos electrónicos a gran escala, publicaciones automatizadas en redes sociales, etc: It’s much less effort to send the same undifferentiated message to hundreds or thousands using software automation, but if you’re trying to sell something, the rule still is: seek first to understand, then to be understood.

If you’re still thinking of spreading something like an email or another type of message to a large group of people at once, make sure you’re not sales-y. Instead be funny, vulnerable, remarkable — and make a good first impression. 💌

CRM totalmente automatizado: Cuando Salesflare comenzó su andadura en 2014, descubrimos que algunas empresas intentaban automatizar totalmente los datos de CRM, sin necesidad de que interviniera el usuario. Rápidamente nos dimos cuenta de que esto no era posible.

You cannot automate everything. Some decisions such as, “Is this a customer? Is there a sales opportunity here? Should this contact really be linked to the account?” are best made by a human.

People like automation, but as soon as it starts making mistakes, it loses its value. 👎

People don’t want to lose that last level of control.

That’s why Salesflare works with suggestions in places where people still want control, and fully automates in other places.

Automation is here to make our lives easier. It’s here to automate robotic tasks. To make us more human. It’s not here to make humans totally unnecessary — at least, not anywhere in the near future.

¿Cómo automatizar la prospección y el enriquecimiento?

Además del trabajo administrativo, las dos tareas que más tiempo consumen son la prospección y el enriquecimiento.

¿Cómo se pueden automatizar estos procesos?

Prospección es una actividad que requiere mucho tiempo, así que intente automatizar las tareas que realiza habitualmente.

The parts of your job where you feel like a robot, would maybe better be done by a robot. 🤖

Algunos ejemplos:

Construir listas: if you find yourself manually filling an Excel sheet, you’re probably doing something wrong.

There are so many ways to build lists nowadays, based on all kinds of parameters. Size of company, geography, growth signals, technology used on their site, etc. That should definitely be done with a good software tool. For instance, there’s a ton of possibilities for lead generation using tools on top of LinkedIn.

Tener un primer toque: That’s not to say you should start to randomly spam people with undifferentiated emails. As mentioned before, that’s the wrong way to go about automation.

En su lugar, piense en formas más amistosas de establecer el primer contacto. Intenta conectar con el público.

A LinkedIn post, a cool blog article, a funny story…get it out there. See whether people like it. Interact with it.

If you’re going to email people, fine, but make sure it’s not like any other email you’ve ever seen in your inbox. And that you set out to start a relationship, not to sell something. 🤝

Creación de puntos de contacto: Ahora hay muchas formas de mantenerse en contacto antes de que alguien de su audiencia se convierta en un buen cliente potencial.

Keep building that relationship through Facebook ads, engagement on social, in groups — find out what works best for your audience, and where they want to engage. Then head there. 🏃‍

Enriquecimiento debería ser bastante fácil de automatizar. Extrae algunos datos de la API de FullContact o de Clearbit. Habla con otras APIs.

On the CRM level, many CRMs say, “you can integrate with Clearbit if you like.”

You go to the Clearbit site, enter your credit card details, set up the integration. Why make it so complicated? 🙅‍

We’ve built it all into Salesflare and included it into the plan, because we believe it’s so basic and you shouldn’t waste time on setting up these things yourself. Users then also benefit from a tighter and more intelligent integration.

Mejores prácticas de lead scoring

La puntuación de clientes potenciales se realiza tradicionalmente en dos direcciones:

• ¿Qué interés tiene la pista para nosotros?
• ¿Qué interés tiene el plomo en nosotros?

Obviamente, se puede establecer algún sistema general que haga alguna puntuación sobre los niveles de interés en las dos direcciones diferentes:

• ¿Qué interés tiene la pista para nosotros?: ¿Cuál es el tamaño de la empresa? ¿Estoy hablando con la persona adecuada? ¿Están creciendo?
• ¿Qué interés tiene el plomo en nosotros?: Are they opening our emails? Clicking on things? Visiting our site? This second part is called “hotness” in Salesflare, and it even alerts you about your hottest leads.

But if you’re looking at what really will turn your lead into a deal, for SaaS companies it’s most often on a whole other level. There are other parameters that can much better predict whether it’s going to be a sale and whether it’s worth spending your time on it or not. ⏳

It’s this North Star metric that’s so popular nowadays. For Slack, it’s how many messages are exchanged in a team. For us, at Salesflare, it’s about the amount of customers created. Its predictive value is obviously way higher than whether people open your emails. 📬

That doesn’t necessarily mean that one metric can capture all. But it’s good to think about what it means to engage a lead enough to turn it into a deal. Measuring it. Improving it.

That’s what real lead scoring is about. 👍

Y, por supuesto, debes sincronizarlo con tu CRM. Filtre sus clientes basándose en él. Centra tus esfuerzos en los clientes potenciales adecuados.

It’s a new way of qualifying leads.

It doesn’t fully replace the old way of qualification, of deciding what leads have a good chance to turn into deals, based on the presence of a budget, whether you’re talking with the right authority, whether they are in need and have definite timelines or not (otherwise known as good old BANT qualification).

But it is a more thoughtful way of thinking about it related to your product or service and more often focuses on a customer’s success than on generalized sales criteria.

Sus herramientas de automatización de ventas

When it comes to finding the right tools for your company, there are a lot of cool tools out there, but it’s more about what you’re trying to do and why.

It’s important to not lose track of the human factor. And to always “do things that don’t scale” first. Be fully human first, and only then hand part of that job to robots.

Si descubre que su público está en Facebook, o en LinkedIn, o que es mejor llegar a ellos por correo electrónico, tenemos guías para todo ello en el blog de Salesflare.

These guides go into how you can leverage data and tools to connect with your audience more efficiently and maybe even more effectively. 💪

But first, really talk to your audience. Connect with them. Understand them. Don’t jump into automation or into tools. Do it all first, until you get tired of it.

Then you can stop and think, “what if I automate this part?” 🤔

And you’ll know exactly how to do it in a way that doesn’t break the real human experience.

Let’s not use automation to create more robot communication and end up drowning in it. Let’s work towards a more human world, in which we can focus and spend more time on our humanity. 👫

Thank you to Andrei Zinkevich for having us for the Facebook Live session! It was an insightful and fun hour packed with great discussion. 😎