Sales Automation 101: i punti salienti della nostra chiacchierata con Andrei Zinkevich

What sales tasks should be automated and in what way?

In parole povere: tutto ciò che non coinvolge le vostre capacità umane uniche dovrebbe essere automatizzato.

Ci sono molte cose che i robot sanno fare meglio di noi, ad esempio:

• Raccolta di dati da e-mail, calendari, telefono, ecc.
• Tenere traccia delle conversazioni complete
• Keeping track of all files you’ve exchanged
• Creare visibilità tra i compagni di squadra nelle conversazioni con i clienti
• Arricchire persone e aziende con dati disponibili al pubblico
• Importare le firme delle e-mail
• Controllare i clienti che non si sentono a proprio agio
• Seeing that you didn’t respond yet to an important email
• Rilevare che un cliente interagisce spesso con voi
• Taglio dei dati
• Spostamento dei dati tra le app
• E molti, molti altri compiti che i venditori affrontano regolarmente!

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.

E in alcuni casi, le attività non generatrici di reddito possono effettivamente generare indirettamente delle entrate.

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.

L'unica cosa che gli esseri umani sanno fare è trattare con gli altri esseri umani. Comprenderli. Comunicare con loro. Aiutarli.

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

A few modern examples –

Chatbot: La tecnologia per chatbot 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. 💬

E questo rende l'esperienza davvero difficile.

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

Email su larga scala, post automatizzati sui social media, ecc: 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 completamente automatizzato: Quando Salesflare ha iniziato la sua attività nel 2014, abbiamo scoperto che alcune aziende cercavano di automatizzare completamente i dati del CRM, senza richiedere l'intervento dell'utente. Ci siamo subito resi conto che questo non era possibile.

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.

Come si può automatizzare la prospezione e l'arricchimento?

Oltre al lavoro amministrativo, i due compiti che richiedono più tempo sono la prospezione e l'arricchimento.

Come si possono automatizzare questi processi?

Prospezione è un'attività che richiede molto tempo, quindi cercate di automatizzare le attività che vi trovate a svolgere abitualmente.

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

Alcuni esempi:

Costruire elenchi: 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.

Avere un primo tocco: 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.

Pensate invece a modi più amichevoli per stabilire un primo contatto. Cercate di entrare in contatto con il pubblico.

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. 🤝

Creare punti di contatto: Ci sono così tanti modi per rimanere in contatto prima che qualcuno del vostro pubblico si trasformi in un buon lead.

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. 🏃‍

Arricchimento dovrebbe essere abbastanza facile da automatizzare. Prelevare alcuni dati dall'API di FullContact o di Clearbit. Parlare con altre 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.

Le migliori pratiche di lead scoring

Il lead scoring viene tradizionalmente effettuato in due direzioni:

• Quanto è interessante la pista per noi?
• Quanto è interessato a noi il protagonista?

Ovviamente, è possibile impostare un sistema generale che calcoli i livelli di interesse nelle due diverse direzioni:

• Quanto è interessante la pista per noi?: Quanto è grande l'azienda? Sto parlando con la persona che ricopre il ruolo giusto? Sono in crescita?
• Quanto è interessato il piombo in noi?: 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. 👍

E naturalmente dovreste sincronizzarlo con il vostro CRM. Filtrate i vostri clienti in base ad esso. Concentrate i vostri sforzi sui lead giusti.

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.

Il vostro kit di strumenti per l'automazione delle vendite

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.

Se scoprite che il vostro pubblico è su Facebook, o su LinkedIn, o che è meglio raggiungibile via e-mail, abbiamo dei playbook per tutto questo sul 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. 😎