Intelligent sale automation is quickly climbing up the list of favourites among sales reps — and for good reason too.
A sales process that is affordable, scalable and requires little involvement — what a dream!
When done right, it can lead to amazing results — sustainable leads flow, more time spent selling and growing than lead collecting.
However, when done wrong, it can damage your brand reputation and scare opportunities away.
Think to the bad automated messages you get on LinkedIn (I get at least a few a day!)
Now think of a few great ones that inspired you to reach out.
The secret missing ingredient there is the human touch.
Here’s a few tips on how to use this secret ingredient and humanise your sales automation process.
Before you customise your message to your audience, you need to know your audience!
Apart from the general information on where they work and what they do, it’s important to understand that the needs and challenges of different target groups can differ and take that into account.
For example, if you are selling a lead generation service, you can convert the sales rep with a message about how easy and seamless it is to collect big numbers of leads and generate consistent bookings.
On the other hand, sales bookings won’t be the pain point for CEOs or Business Development managers. For them, the unique selling proposition may be consistent increased revenue and establishing a higher position on the market.
Different strokes for different folks as they say — and knowing exactly which message will resonate with your buyer will humanise the connection instead of being dismissed as another sales cold email.
One of the most basic things you can do that shows you you’ve done even a bit of research into your prospects, is using personalisation tags.
Deepening on your prospect database, you can use any number of personalisation tags, like [Name], [CompanyName], [Title], [Location], [Industry] etc.
Email automation tools like Sendy allow you to create your own tags, so you can get creative and come up with some unique characteristics of your audience.
There are of course a few pitfalls with this kind of personalisation — sometimes it can come across creepy and unnatural.
Take a look at this connection request I got recently:
The odd wording and lack of plural makes it blatantly obvious that this is an automated message. Worse even, it wasn’t given a second thought beyond that initial personalisation!
Sometimes it’s best to come up with a generalisation than let automated tools ruin your relationships with potential prospects.
Nothing makes a message feel more personal than a custom recorded video (or so the prospect will think).
Average cold emails suffer from the black-and-white soulless nature of the medium. And now, during the pandemic, people crave human connection more than ever.
Video-messages in emails have recently become very popular in B2B lead generation. Most sales reps haven’t caught up with the trend yet — so it’s your chance to stand out and grab your prospect’s attention by putting a face to the cold email.
Of course you cannot record a custom video for every lead in the automation — that would defeat the whole purpose! So it’s best to avoid any specifics, like names or positions.
Instead, focus on what you have in common, how you understand their struggles and offer a sneak peak of a solution.
The rest of the personalisation will be filled out in the text around the video itself.
If you want to try video-outreach, contact our team here.
The single biggest thing that kills automated cold emails and messages, even more than bad personalisation tags, is the robotic and impersonal tone of voice.
Yes, B2B communication is usually serious — but it doesn’t mean it has to be boring!
Avoid overly formal grammar, complex explanations and cliched buzzwords.
Here’s a big secret that everyone knows but doesn’t want to admit (especially people who write cold emails) — people almost never read cold emails, they only scan them.
So, if your message is difficult to scan in 2–3 seconds, it will not only NOT land you a sale, but go straight to the bin or even spam.
Write your message as if you are writing someone you know — here’s where that market segmentation really comes in handy.
Once you imagine your prospect to a T — what they are doing, feeling, thinking, struggling with — you’ll be able to craft a message that will tick all the boxes while being generic enough for a mass send.
Last but not least — this is a good rule for almost any kind of automated outreach you are doing, LinkedIn, email or ad retarget.
Don’t focus too much on making a sale. People, like you and me, can sense a sales pitch from a subject line away.
Instead, focus on what you can do for your prospect.
It all comes down to a simple but effective formula — identify their problem and offer to solve it.
Despite the fact that automating your sales process in the end can and will result in a sale, try to concentrate on building enough incentive for the prospect to work up to that sale.
Here are some tips and examples of good value-bringing cold emails.
As much as robots try, they can never replace human’s ability for communication.
Same with sales automation — while automating mundane tasks and generating leads might be the solution you are looking for, no good automated message can beat a real-life sales rep.
As they say, people don’t buy from companies — they buy from people. Now more than ever people are looking for bigger connections with brands. Building personal and long-term business relationships is one of the main focuses of selling practices in 2021.
By humanising your automation, you’ll make a bigger, stronger impact in your target market and land those right accounts.
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