Automação de vendas 101: Destaques de nossa conversa com Andrei Zinkevich

What sales tasks should be automated and in what way?

Para simplificar: tudo o que não envolve suas capacidades humanas exclusivas deve ser automatizado.

Há muitas coisas em que os robôs são melhores do que nós, por exemplo:

• Reunir dados de e-mail, calendários, telefone, etc.
• Manter o controle de conversas completas
• Keeping track of all files you’ve exchanged
• Criar visibilidade entre os colegas de equipe nas conversas com os clientes
• Enriquecimento de pessoas e empresas com dados disponíveis publicamente
• Importação de assinaturas de e-mail
• Verificar com os clientes que estão ficando quietos
• Seeing that you didn’t respond yet to an important email
• Detectar que um cliente está interagindo muito com você
• Corte de dados
• Mover dados entre aplicativos
• E muitas, muitas outras tarefas que os vendedores realizam regularmente!

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, em alguns casos, as atividades que não geram receita podem, na verdade, gerar receita indiretamente.

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.

A única coisa em que os seres humanos são excepcionalmente bons é em lidar com outros seres humanos. Entendê-los. Comunicar-se com eles. Ajudá-los.

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

A few modern examples –

Chatbots: A tecnologia 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. 💬

E isso gera experiências realmente ruins.

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

E-mails em grande escala, publicações automatizadas em mídias sociais, 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: Quando a Salesflare começou em 2014, descobrimos algumas empresas tentando automatizar totalmente os dados de CRM, sem precisar de nenhuma intervenção do usuário. Logo percebemos que isso não era possível.

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.

Como você pode automatizar a prospecção e o enriquecimento?

Além do trabalho administrativo, as duas tarefas que mais consomem tempo são a prospecção e o enriquecimento.

Como você pode automatizar esses processos?

Prospecção é, de fato, um negócio que consome muito tempo, portanto, tente automatizar as tarefas que você faz rotineiramente.

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

Alguns exemplos:

Criação de 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.

Ter um primeiro 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.

Em vez disso, pense em maneiras mais amigáveis de fazer o primeiro contato. Tente se conectar com o 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. 🤝

Criação de pontos de contato: Há muitas maneiras de manter contato agora, antes que alguém do seu público se transforme em um bom 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. 🏃‍

Enriquecimento deve ser bastante fácil de automatizar. Extraia alguns dados da API da FullContact ou da Clearbit. Converse com outras 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.

Práticas recomendadas de pontuação de leads

A pontuação de leads é tradicionalmente feita em duas direções:

• Quão interessante é a pista para nós?
• Qual é o interesse do líder em nós?

Obviamente, você pode configurar algum sistema geral que faça alguma pontuação nos níveis de interesse nas duas direções diferentes:

• Quão interessante é a pista para nós?: Qual é o tamanho da empresa? Estou falando com a pessoa que ocupa a função certa? A empresa está crescendo?
• Qual é o interesse do líder em nós?: 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, é claro, você deve sincronizá-lo com seu CRM. Filtre seus clientes com base nisso. Concentre seus esforços nos leads certos.

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.

Seu kit de ferramentas de automação de vendas

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 você descobrir que seu público-alvo está no Facebook ou no LinkedIn, ou que é melhor contatá-lo por e-mail, temos manuais para tudo isso no blog 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. 😎