Automatisation des ventes 101 : Points forts de notre entretien avec Andrei Zinkevich

What sales tasks should be automated and in what way?

En clair, tout ce qui ne fait pas appel à vos capacités humaines uniques doit être automatisé.

Il y a beaucoup de choses pour lesquelles les robots sont meilleurs que nous, comme par exemple :

• Rassembler des données provenant de courriers électroniques, de calendriers, de téléphones, etc.
• Garder la trace des conversations complètes
• Keeping track of all files you’ve exchanged
• Créer de la visibilité entre les membres de l'équipe dans les conversations avec les clients
• Enrichir les personnes et les entreprises avec des données accessibles au public
• Importation de signatures de courriel
• Vérifier auprès des clients qui se taisent
• Seeing that you didn’t respond yet to an important email
• Détecter qu'un client interagit souvent avec vous
• Découper les données
• Déplacer des données entre les applications
• Et bien d'autres tâches auxquelles les vendeurs s'attaquent régulièrement !

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.

Dans certains cas, des activités non génératrices de revenus peuvent en fait générer indirectement des revenus.

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.

Ce que les humains savent faire de mieux, c'est traiter avec d'autres humains. Les comprendre. Communiquer avec eux. Les aider.

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

A few modern examples –

Chatbots: La technologie pour 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. 💬

Et cela donne lieu à des expériences vraiment désagréables.

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

Courriels à grande échelle, messages automatisés sur les médias sociaux, 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 entièrement automatisé : Lorsque Salesflare a démarré en 2014, nous avons découvert que certaines entreprises essayaient d'automatiser entièrement les données CRM, sans aucune intervention de l'utilisateur. Nous avons rapidement compris que ce n'était pas possible.

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.

Comment automatiser la prospection et l'enrichissement ?

Outre le travail administratif, les deux tâches les plus chronophages sont la prospection et l'enrichissement.

Comment automatiser ces processus ?

Prospection est en effet une activité qui prend du temps, alors essayez d'automatiser les tâches que vous effectuez régulièrement.

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

Quelques exemples :

Établir des listes: 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.

Avoir une première touche: 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.

Pensez plutôt à des moyens plus conviviaux d'établir un premier contact. Essayez d'entrer en contact avec le public.

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. 🤝

Créer des points de contact: Il y a tant de façons de rester en contact avant qu'un membre de votre public ne devienne un bon client potentiel.

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. 🏃‍

Enrichissement devrait être assez facile à automatiser. Extrayez des données de l'API FullContact ou Clearbit. Contactez d'autres API.

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.

Meilleures pratiques en matière d'évaluation des prospects

L'évaluation des prospects se fait traditionnellement dans deux directions :

• Quel est l'intérêt de cette piste pour nous ?
• Dans quelle mesure le chef de file s'intéresse-t-il à nous ?

Il est évident que vous pouvez mettre en place un système général qui évalue les niveaux d'intérêt dans les deux directions différentes :

• Quel est l'intérêt de cette piste pour nous ?: Quelle est la taille de l'entreprise ? Est-ce que je m'adresse à la personne qui occupe le bon poste ? L'entreprise est-elle en pleine croissance ?
• Quel est l'intérêt du chef de file pour nous ?: 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. 👍

Et bien sûr, vous devez le synchroniser avec votre CRM. Filtrez vos clients en fonction de ces données. Concentrez vos efforts sur les bons prospects.

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.

Votre boîte à outils d'automatisation des ventes

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 vous découvrez que votre public est sur Facebook, ou sur LinkedIn, ou qu'il est plus facilement joignable par email, nous avons des playbooks pour tout cela sur le Salesflare blog.

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. 😎