Over a hundred years ago, Henry Ford created the assembly line to manufacture his Model T automobile, one of the first mass-produced vehicles in the world. He understood that manually performing repetitive tasks consumes precious time and slows down production. By moving the vehicle to the worker, rather than the worker moving around the factory, conveying automated the product through the phases of manufacturing. Further automating these processes by leveraging machines in addition to people, Ford streamlined output allowing him to produce the Model T faster and 24 hours a day.
Ford was able to hit the gas, so to speak, on getting his new product out the door. Today, these advantages become exceedingly clear as companies explore new options in and adopt automation.
The Inside Track: Automation’s Advantages for Companies of Any Size
Both marketers and salespeople have never before seen such innovative ways to save time, increase efficiency, and reduce drag caused by human error or redundant and tedious tasks. When done correctly, automation enhances the customer experience and makes sales and marketing easier for companies of any size, all while enabling future scalability.
Increase Efficiency and Reduce Workload
Let’s face it, employees get weighed down when their daily workload is one manual process after another. It’s overwhelming and promptly leads to burnout and turnover. Having a customer relationship management platform, or CRM, such as HubSpot takes some of that load off. When configured correctly, a CRM works alongside teams in stride, becoming an extension of them. It can act as a sort-of full-time administrative assistant helping your team achieve their goals and hit those KPIs.
I was once a phone jockey. It was eons ago, but I was in outbound sales with a 100-call-per-day quota. I admit that talking to voicemail recordings all day was tough, but I consistently hit quota. Why? Because I used the power of automation to my advantage.
The first thing I did each morning when I came in was log into HubSpot and check its Activity Feed from the night before. The Activity Feed showed who opened my emails or clicked a link while I was in bed, fast asleep. I added them to my task queue for calls, and when I was ready, I would open the queue, make the call and log it. Next, I would mark the task as complete, reschedule or skip it altogether using the banner across the top of the record. I never had to search for it the contact’s info in a list or view or open their record.
To speed things up even more, I also used snippets to log my calls. If I typed #NALM, HubSpot knew I meant, “Called the phone number on file, received no answer, and left a message on their voicemail.” It would add that full text in call notes, and I was off to the next voicemail greeting.
When I sent emails, I almost always used a sequence. I didn’t need reminders to send follow-up emails; if I received a reply, the person would automatically be unenrolled from the sequence. There was no need to mark anything down or remove them from a list to stop the subsequent emails.
The real advantage of setting up all of these automated actions is that many happened independently, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, without me needing to lift a finger. Sales is a numbers game: utilizing as many built-in, automated tools as possible increased my efficiency while decreasing my workload. I could make more calls during the same hours and have a better chance of speaking to a live person. Closing the deal, however, was a different story.
Streamline Processes
Another advantage of automation is that it streamlines processes through standardization. Sharable email templates ensure consistency with your brand’s expertly crafted voice and tone while eliminating typos and other errors.
Does your company use PascalCase for its name like HubSpot does? Or do your products use camelCase like Apple used to use for all of their products like the iPhone, iPad, and iMac? Brand identity is essential, and inconsistent branding in an email can wreak havoc on both customer experience and your company’s integrity. Remove the guesswork of what to say with a preapproved template and ensure every customer interaction aligns with your predefined sales and marketing messaging.
Lead scoring can also be powerful and aids sales teams in focusing their efforts by identifying and prioritizing high-value prospects. By engaging with content, the system can increase a lead’s score when they show buying intent or interest in your products and services by visiting pages on your website or viewing content like documents or video. Alternatively, the system can reduce the score if the only web page they visited is your careers page or, if they’re likely a competitor of yours.
Enhance Customer Experience
Emails can be cold. That’s why sending one to someone you don’t know is usually referred to as a “cold outreach.” You’ve never met them, and you’ve never spoken to them. Personalized emails can be more conversational and improve engagement. HubSpot’s Personalization Tokens dynamically merge company or contact details from a record into your messaging. These tokens also make each email unique. Customizing the subject and body of your emails can reduce the chances of a company’s email domain getting flagged as spam, being added to a blocklist, and potentially damaging your email domain sending reputation.
Automated emails, such as welcome messages confirming subscriptions to newsletters or blogs, are relatively easy to deploy. Templated emails with onboarding materials for new customers or personalized content targeting engaged contacts are also perfect candidates for automation. When timed correctly, triggering customized communications with contact-specific details to go out ensures a better customer experience across the contacts’ entire lifecycle. They can nurture the relationship and boost overall customer retention.
Consistent messaging across the customer lifecycle shows poise and confidence, positively impacting the customer experience. People not only do business with those they like, but they become and remain patrons of companies they believe in at an emotional level.
At the same time, junior team members’ inexperience and veterans used to doing things the old way can cause aftereffects that are encountered much later in the buyer’s journey. And, by that stage, it may be too late, compounded by the fact that adoption of standard practices can be a challenge at times.
More often than not, the only way to enforce adoption is to tie compensation to the desired result or outcome. But why punish reps if what’s being asked of them could easily be automated? Reduce the dependency on human capital and automate as much of their processes as possible with workflows. Take the onus – and the pressure – off the individual. Optimize processes, make them easily repeatable, and they will become scalable. Not to mention, it makes onboarding new reps more manageable while accelerating their ramp period.
Chatbots are another excellent tool for enhancing customer experience. This automated tool deployed on a web page can assist in qualifying new leads, act as a first line of defense for general inquiries, or even provide tier-one support for customer troubleshooting. Questions are quickly answered in the communication channel they prefer to use, and one convenient for them in that moment.
Improve Cost Savings and ROI
Two common approaches to increase a company’s profitability are to increase revenue or reduce expenses. What better way to lower operational expenditures (OpEx) than to employ an army of autonomous functions inside a CRM? Any operation that minimizes the need for manual labor while optimizing resource allocation is well worth the time it takes to set up. In theory, it will eventually pay for itself.
Leaders want teams to fire on all cylinders. If their top-performing sales representatives spend hours updating records, entering data, or manually sending nurture emails, it can be like trying to drive a Ferrari in a traffic jam. They need to spend more time working on the deals in their pipeline, especially those inches from the finish line.
What’s more, adding headcount is only sometimes the answer. When existing resources within an organization have more time and improve productivity through a library of automation tools, they can produce more while doing less. The overall return on investment of resources already in place improves, as does the balance sheet. It also allows teams to focus on high-value tasks and activities that a computer can’t do.
There’s a term for the ever-expanding tech stack that most companies experience today. With so many tools and services available online, it’s no wonder that poor procurement processes and lack of budgetary oversight lead to “tech bloat.” Teams and departments purchasing tools and signing up for subscriptions independently can create zombie accounts: when someone leaves the organization, and no one deactivates the recurring subscription. Using multifunctional software under a single account that does what previously required multiple tools is commonly called consolidating the tech stack, which keeps costs down by eliminating unused or underutilized software. While these last few examples are not necessarily automated methods of reducing costs, they certainly merit mentioning.
Conclusion: Off the Assembly Line and Into a Future of Possibilities
In the automation age, some view these tools as a detriment; what once took a team of people now takes clicks or a few buttons. Jobs are being sequestered and, to them, what once was a part of the human experience, has finally succumbed to the inevitable technological advancement dubbed some 70 years ago as “robots.” In their eyes, we’re losing the element of human touch.
Looking at it through the lens of possibility, as Ford once did with his factory, automation empowers us mere mortals. Businesses and their employees can truly work smarter and not harder. Productivity goes up and, along with it, efficiency. Why not save hours a day, and free up valuable resources so they can focus precious time on tasks that automation or AI could never do, like building relationships, shaking hands and closing deals? (At least not yet…)
If you’ve stayed with me this far, you’ll notice I didn’t mention anything until just now about artificial intelligence. I wanted to keep this strictly about automation. What’s the difference?
The difference is like comparing a horse-drawn carriage to an automobile, like comparing a garage-built soapbox derby car to a Formula 1 model: it doesn’t.
With what’s on the horizon, as AI quickly eclipses anything we’ve ever seen, we’re going to have to come up with a new term for ‘game-changing’ when it comes to automation. Stay tuned.
