How to automate and personalize digital sales in 2022? Everything is becoming faster, more efficient, and more cost-effective as a result of digital technologies.
Almost all industries, including sales, have felt the impact of these technologies over the last decade. Salespeople today have more tools to generate prospects, qualify them, and contact them – all while keeping a better track of the entire sales process.
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Personalization is one element that organizations occasionally compromise with this digitalized approach. Anyone who works in sales is undoubtedly aware that knowing your consumer and engaging each prospect with a personalized strategy is the way to go in today’s competitive landscape.
So, how can we maintain that human touch while depending on automation and new technologies to make sales more cost-effective?
The Current Situation: The State Of Automation in 2021
Software automation has been progressively making waves across all industries, with particular prominence in the marketing space.
You can automate practically anything as a digital marketer in 2021. Every task, such as scheduling social media postings, can be delegated to a software solution. In several areas, the software market has likewise grown quite competitive.
According to a Market Research Future analysis, the marketing automation software market might be worth more than $10 billion by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.7%. This is remarkable, especially given how competitive the field is already. Simply googling “task management tool” will reveal the heated competition for the top spot in the search results.
More notably, while many firms cut back on marketing during the pandemic, marketing technology investments have increased. According to Gartner, marketing budgets’ share of overall revenue will decline in 2022. Despite this, nearly 75% of CMOs anticipate raising their technology investment this year, based on the Gartner CMO Spend Survey.
The Future of Sales: Using Automation
One of the reasons software automation is gaining popularity is its low cost and lower risk of human error. The logic behind automation software is that by delegating some mundane, repetitive activities to software, our employees could focus on more important responsibilities.
However, in sales, the boundary between repetitive and big-picture duties is a little hazy.
When you need to nurture and treat each lead differently, you practically need a salesperson to contact each prospect, compose messages, and handle calls.
What role may automation software play in this process? Here are a few examples.
• Reach out to more prospects in less time: With sales automation software, you can set everything up to reach out to more prospects in less time. Some tools can deliver different messages at different times, follow up automatically, and do a variety of other things.
• Find and qualify leads: Many automation platforms have powerful search capabilities to assist you in finding narrowly targeted prospects, as well as features such as lead scoring, interaction history, flow automation, and so on.
• Get a better overview: With the correct tools in place, you can delve into your sales process and detect any problems. Is there a particular stage of the client journey where you appear to be losing prospects? Is there a certain salesperson who outperforms the others?
How Do You Maintain Your Personal Touch?
On the other side, if you rely too heavily on automation, you risk losing that all-important personal touch. This is one of the most serious drawbacks of automation. There are essentially two main techniques to avoid this and maintain personalization at the forefront of your mind.
The first thing you can do is leverage the software to help your salespeople while still making they are important contributors to the sales plan. This means that your employees will use sales tools to make their tasks easier and more practical. Make certain that real people still produce sales messages, respond to everything, and react to everything.
Another thing I’ve discovered is that people buy from other people. Sure, LinkedIn messages and automated emails might get you amazing results if you employ good personalization strategies, but when it comes to closing a transaction, you should do so with a personal touch. This entails having active salespeople who participate in demo calls and answer inbound calls to ensure that your prospects are interacting with a person.
I believe that the second technique to personalize your automated sales outreach, hyper-personalization, should pique the interest of modern sales professionals.
This method goes beyond the [first name] and [last name] tags that we’ve all become accustomed to. It’s about finding a way to stand out in your prospect’s inbox, catch their attention, and build an instant connection, whether a human or a software program writes the message.
Hyper-personalization can take many forms and can be done manually or with a sales automation platform, but it often involves exploiting prospect data to provide targeted messages. You may enhance your LinkedIn connection request or email by noting your prospect’s current or past employment, education, and interests, as well as content they’ve posted or interacted with, mutual connections, groups they’re a part of, and more.
Conclusion
We are living in an exciting time in the history of digital sales. It’s a period in which technology and humans are pushing the limits of how personal we can go, and I believe both salespeople and customers will continue to benefit.
Last Updated on June 20, 2023
