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THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK - Overly automated marketing and sales may be killing your business!
I receive several dozen e-mail and LinkedIn solicitations each day. They are automated messages making broad, and sometimes incorrect, assumptions about who I am, what my role is, and trying to convince me that a specific solution is just what I need. Sometimes an automated calendar tool is included, encouraging me to schedule a meeting. The worst example of these are cold e-mails that also task me with connecting them to the right person in my organization, if I am not that person. You likely receive the same kind of communications.
The efficiency gained by this automated approach to developing personal connections is alluring, but many of us take it too far and it is killing businesses.
If your business prepares tax returns in the US and they are due in two days, casting a wide impersonal net may bring in some business. However, this approach for complex B2B purchasing decisions does harm to the seller’s brand because it turns personal relationship building into a faceless, automated process.
As a B2B solution provider, how automated are your marketing communications?
Have you identified when you transition from automated messages to customized, personal engagement with prospects and customers?
If you haven’t considered these questions, or have not in a while, here is a recommendation.
1. Assemble a small group of marketers and salespeople and do some brainstorming.
2. Review the various ways you receive prospect contact information and your current follow-up procedure.
3. When are contacts transitioned from marketing to sales (MQLs-SQLs)?
4. When do you transition from automated messaging to personalized messaging?
5. Put yourself in the place of the person receiving your messages!
Most of us use some form of automation to support our marketing and sales, it delivers efficiency, leads to productivity, and helps us manage prospect and customer data. However, we tend to fall in love with it and go too far. When we do, it can become an unwelcome intrusion from the prospect’s point of view.
Through most of their journey, B2B buyers are assessing potential service providers based on trust, cultural fit, teamwork potential, and whether a seller can actually help them solve a problem. This is best done person to person, not brand to contact list.
This week, intentionally assess your automated versus personal messaging. If you were the buyer, how would you assess yourself?
I hope you have a great week!
--Perry
Visit us at follow your buyer for more.
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Perry Rearick
Chief Editor | Follow Your Buyer
prearick@followyourbuyer.com
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