There are lots of tools for sales and marketing automation, some quite powerful and effective, in the appropriate situation. But all of these tools will fail if you need to have real relationships and you try to “outsource” your side of the relationship to the tool. What you need to help you have more, better relationships is sales and marketing organization.
Is there a place for automation? Sure– as a way to handle basic confirmations and notifications, or even email newsletters. In some businesses, that’s all you need. Automate away.
But if you’re in a relationship business, you’re in a conversation business. You can’t automate the conversations. (Bookmark this and perhaps AI advances will prove me wrong. You can even check out this conversation I had with ChatGPT and decide how realistic it sounds to you.)
And if you’re in a business like this, it’s OK to use automation tools to promote events like webinars and other events. But there’s only so far you can take this. Last week I got a particularly funny automated message on LinkedIn:
Hi Reuben,
How are you?
I wanted to revisit our conversation regarding… [blah blah blah, more B.S.]
Now, is this person evil? Probably not. They may not even know that these messages are going out (although presumably they at least know that they hired someone to send out automated messages). But is this someone I can trust? Nope.
Instead, think about how we use technology to organize our conversations.
- Calendar tools make it easier to schedule conversations and block out slots for simply doing follow-up.
- Your CRM should help you keep up with those conversations, never missing follow-ups.
- You should be able to search your notes in your CRM, so you can pick up your next conversation where you left off, or track down key words.
- Make sure you’re tracking your referrals and the results of those introductions, to create a positive feedback loop to get more referrals. (And make sure you’re also making good introductions for others– your CRM should help you make referrals, too.)
- Use AI to transcribe videos, parse contact information, extract sentiments from reviews, etc.
So rather than trying to automate your relationships, take advantage of computing power to organize information and logistics, so you can focus on the human-to-human conversation. When you’re considering new technological capabilities, ask yourself if you’re trying to get out of, or into the right conversations.