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Failure to Automate -- Why SDRs Aren't Robots
Oct 2, 2020 | 4 minute read
The Holy Grail of sales automation is to have a tool that automatically fills a queue of emails to be sent and magically fills the SDRs calendars with highly qualified call appointments. Let’s take a look at why that sort of sales automation tool does not exist.
When we, as humans, look to change things up or to broaden the scope of prospects we are reaching out to, we tend to know generally what could or could not work. This is contextual knowledge built up about our industry, product, and the market. Not all of this can be transferred on to paper, many times it is either a gut feeling or experience.
When automated software, AI or otherwise, looks to try something new it has a couple of options. It can take a few things it has already seen that worked well and sort of mash them up to see if that works, or it can pick a strategy completely at random from the whole space of possibilities.
Automated software may see that the “Q3 Agencies and PR Firms” blast did quite well and there is an opportunity to reach out to Enterprise Brands in the CPG space (probably based on open rate from a small number of emails sent in the past through targeted campaigns). What the software has no way of knowing is sending that blast to enterprise CPG brands makes no sense.
The first thing we might do to approach a new industry or market segment is to do some research on the space. Who are the people that will pick up the phone and who are the people who can actually make the buying decision? From here we can devise a plan to reach out to the right people and get talking to decision makers sooner.
Automated software can do bits and pieces of this, but it takes a human to jigsaw them together. Most CRMs and lead data tools can distinguish between levels of hierarchy within a business (representative, manager, director, etc), and many pieces of software can figure out which of these seniority levels is most likely to get on the phone.
What software lacks is any sort of information on who the right person to talk to about a buying decision is. An automated system like that could have the phone ringing off the hook, but the qualified rate would be abysmal.
Finding the right person to talk to can actually be automated… as long as your automation system has an obscene amount of data. This still has the problem of only being able to predict situations it has scene before, however. Finding the right person to talk to in an unseen industry (or any number of other changed variables) will still be very problematic.
The only companies that can do this sort of automation would be the mega-corp CRM companies like Salesforce. Having a database with interactions between near every type of business with near every other type of business is quite a thing.
The fully-automated dream of being able to have meetings set for you and spend all day on the phone with highly-qualified candidates is not something we are likely to get soon, however that does not mean that automation is not going to get significantly better. Automation has already sped up the process of finding contacts and getting emails, sequencing, and pipeline management. What comes next is improving the quality of leads by way of recommendation engines, and loosely guided prospect discovery.
If Uber Eats knows when you want Tacos, what happens when you flip that on its head and tell the taco restaurant who wants the tacos? (This is a terrible business model for tacos please don’t actually do that) The same principle applies here. Because these tools now have exhaustive databases of existing companies it is fairly trivial to start suggesting very relevant companies to your prospecting efforts.
With everything in place for a recommendation engine of which companies to prospect it becomes quite possible to loosely automate prospect discovery. You will likely still need to fine-tune the roles, geographies, and other filters to find the right fit, but given those filters these systems should quickly be able to automate a list for you.
No spoilers, but this is one of the areas Ashpool is focused on. Today you can automate the mechanical side of your prospecting efforts using Tofu and enrich your prospects through Ashpool’s Preflight.