The modern digital environment serves up a difficult dilemma to our sales team at Major Tom.
On the one hand, our Account Executives now have a nearly infinite number of touchpoints with which to engage with potential clients. On the other, the need for first-rate customer service during every interaction has never been greater.
Of course, there’s only so much time in the day, so how could we ensure that our team is able to handle all these interactions, without sacrificing the personal touch that is a key part of our agency?
It may sound contradictory, but the answer lies in automation.
Automation may not be the first thing you think about when it comes to generating more personable interactions. After all, the thought of automation tools crafting conversations feels inherently impersonal.
But as an agency that’s fully embraced the opportunities served up by platforms such as HubSpot, we’ve always believed in the potential for automation to improve the way in which we engage with potential clients.
This thinking was reinforced recently when our sales team enrolled in Dan Tyre’s “Pipeline Generation Boot Camp” to find out how they could finetune their automation systems to deliver quantity and quality at the same time.
The key to the eight-week program was learning how we could utilize automation as a tool to make more meaningful connections with customers, not just increase the number of prospects we could interact within a given day.
It obviously sounds great in theory, but the real test came when we began putting Dan’s principles into practice. We began by integrating HubSpot’s sales tools into our team’s day-to-day routines, carving out time to utilize them to generate more qualified leads.
Just some of the ways our team has used automation to make their interactions more personable include:
We can now coordinate meetings with clients without four separate emails, three different phone calls, and 15 minutes of awkwardly waiting on a conference call because there was confusion around the meeting time.
HubSpot’s meeting scheduling software allows our team to easily send their calendar to customers with a click of a button so they can choose a time that best accommodates their schedules.
Having the ability to schedule meetings so efficiently cuts down on admin and frees up more time for our account teams to spend on solving our clients’ problems.
Selling is a human-to-human process, so how do you build that human interaction into your automation, using tools to increase your productivity while still tailoring the experience to the needs of your customer?
The key is prioritization. Throughout every sales email thread no matter how personable the Account Executive is, there are always a few emails that generally become repetitive — no matter the vertical or potential solution.
Leveraging email templates has helped us to spend more time crafting conversations with prospective clients, not only does this enable us to add more value to interactions but also tailor them to their specific situation. Just remember to make your emails warm and friendly, not robotic.
Speaking of repetitive emails, anyone in sales will tell you that the task of follow-up emails to prospects is a time-consuming process. Of course, customers have their own priorities, schedules, and teams to manage; as sales professionals, it is our team’s job to be politely persistent if we indeed do want to work with them.
However, it can be easy to let contacts slip through the cracks. Inboxes get overrun, deadlines become tighter, and month-end always seems to creep up on everyone.
Having the ability to send a series of automated follow-up emails ensures that our customers are never forgotten about.
Sometimes you can never really get a good read on a prospective customer’s interest in partnering with your agency. However, the opportunities provided by automation means that it is now easier than ever to qualify leads before you even begin engaging with them.
With HubSpot sales software, the Major Tom team has set up notifications, email digests, and can even send text messages when a prospect (or entirely new lead) visits a specific landing page, downloads a piece of content, or engages with your company in any other way you deem as a valuable action.
Utilizing HubSpot’s CRM insights, we can now see a customer’s journey through the information on our site. Our team can see which blog posts they read, which landing pages they visited and which services they may be interested in.
Not only does this help us qualify our leads, but armed with this information we have a much deeper understanding of what solutions the customer is interested in learning more about enabling us to personally tailor a response to their specific needs.
Much like automation, sometimes sales professionals just need a bit of a reconfiguration to develop into a highly effective, well-oiled machine.
In our case, Dan Tyre’s bootcamp helped to refocus our approach to automation, taking advantage of the technology’s potential to not just scale up the number of interactions but the quality of them as well.
If you’d like to know more about what marketing automation can do for you, get in touch. Our experts will be happy to help you leverage its power.
What I have is a malevolent curiosity - I do tend to take a different perspective.
