Automation and personalization are both key factors of a successful sales experience for your new customers. That said, it can be difficult to identify the best times to use automation. You’d hate to lose any of the precious hyper-personal touches that set you apart. But you’d also hate to sacrifice volume for the sake a just a few personalized conversations.
Defining that balance can be tricky, but once you’ve started to intelligently automate repetitive tasks, you’ll notice you have more time in your day to focus on what really matters – your prospects and customers.
Account Executive, Andrew Davidson, joins us in this episode to talk about a few of the areas he applies automation to free up his day. Let’s explore three of his favorite:
Transcript
Andrew Davidson, Account Executive at Salesloft. Today I’m going to talk to you about when and how to use automation to boost your sales game. As sales reps, we know that establishing a human connection is the critical for success. But in today’s world that’s packed full of technology, that can be difficult. The truth is, personalization and automation should be balanced, and there’s a time and place for each. Great automation will actually save time without sacrificing value. I’m going to share three of the best uses of automation that will keep mundane and monotonous administrative tasks off your plate, so you can spend more time selling.
First up involves email. I usually kick off my cadences with a hyper-personalized email to the prospect. It’s carefully aligned to the persona, needs, and initiatives of the prospect, account and industry. So, this one’s going to be a little bit more of a time-consuming step. But what’s great, is I can create a cadence step that will send and in-thread email a few days later to bring that personalized email back to the top of the prospects inbox. This is a creative way to resurface value without having to re-personalize a new email, looking for identical information, or hoping for another compelling event. It’s a step I would execute regardless, but it saves time on copying, pasting, or creating a whole new email.
A second way to use automation, is a triggered standard of success within the Salesloft platform. So internally, if an SDR schedules a meeting, we consider that a success. Once a demo is scheduled, your team doesn’t want to pester the prospect or their colleagues with emails or phone calls. Manually, this requires removing all prospects from that account within sales loft, and also updating the information within Salesforce. Rather than doing all this manual work, we set up these automation rules to execute everything for us. Simply marking someone as a success will automatically remove them from a cadence, remove everyone else within that account from a cadence, update the records in Salesforce, and also notify any other reps who have been working on that account. This drastically cuts down on duplicate work, and makes sure that nothing slips through the cracks.
My last tip involves transferring prospects in between cadences. We found success in both account-based and persona-based cadences. Throughout your cadences, you’ll connect with certain prospects and learn that timing might be off for those accounts. This means you don’t need to communicate as frequently. But rather than pushing an account in Salesforce, we can simply switch a prospect from an account-based cadence, into a persona-based cadence. This allows us to automate based on a prospects level of interest. For example, if a prospect clicks or views an email up to five times, the remaining steps for that day become calls to strike while the iron’s hot.
There’s a huge number of uses for automation, but these three help our sales team manage a prospect faster, and spend more time on engage selling. Thanks for watching; I hope you learned when and where automation will help your sales teams productivity, and how to implement it effectively. Feel free to drop any question or comments below. Thanks again, and have a great day.