Made For
Utilizing Lead-Gen Automation
Sep 23, 2020 | 3 minute read
Automation has continued to reach new heights as new technologies have entered our sales tech stacks. Contact data is more readily accessible than ever and better interfaces are chipping away at the amount of data-entry is needed every day.
With all these new technologies at play and a seemingly infinite onslaught of new tools piecing together a sales automation tech stack has become an overwhelming task. These tools all tend to have their own way of approaching things as there is no right way to approach lead gen automation – at least not for everyone.
When considering automating prospecting and other lead generation tasks you first need to narrow down what exactly you should be automating. There are two primary facets to consider for your team: What is taking up the majority of the day and what might be the easiest things to automate.
Consider for yourself or ask your team to break down what they spend the most time doing at a pretty granular level. For example many spend most of their time ‘prospecting’ but what this actually looks like is copying and pasting info from LinkedIn (Quick plug: if this is you, you should check out Tofu). Break everything down and find the top 5-10 tasks you spend time on.
It would be easy to stop here and consider this the list of things to automate, however you should consider as well how easy these things will be to automate. Some task automation comes with setup time and all automation comes with cost. If you’ve traded 15 minutes of work for 10 minutes of setup and a $20 fee, does that really make sense? Start with the easily and cheaply automated tasks on the list, then see how you feel about about automating the harder stuff.
Many who start down this path see the time benefits and want to start automating everything. Much of that energy is great! However it is worth taking into consideration what may be lost by taking a human out of the equation.
Certain tasks are purely mechanical and having a human do them makes the work worse. Take data entry, where a person may typo or fat-finger an entry a computer never will. There is no risk to removing a person from purely mechanical tasks.
Other tasks lie on a spectrum between mechanical and strategic (some might even say creative). Any task that has any facet of strategy to it will face the possibility of being dulled by automation.
Say you are setting up a new list with leads to be prospected in a particular industry and your approach is to grab a few contacts with a specific title at each company. One company, however, you know to be similar to a company you’ve recently prospected and had better success approaching someone with a different position.
These types of intuitions are entirely lost in a fully automated system. While that specific case could technically be sorted out through machine learning, most lead gen automation systems are far more naive. Consider other areas where you may be applying domain knowledge even without thinking about it.
There is a coming wave of tools which will offer an advanced range of automation services, even to the point where filling the top of your sales funnel is only a matter of defining what type of prospects you’d like to fill it with.
These tools are presently possible and exist in some sales teams. The lessons being learned right now are how to automate as much as possible without losing those strategic advantages gained by having a human at the wheel.
Ashpool’s approach to this is simple: Automate anything mechanical, but assist any activity that stands to gain from strategic human input. How this tends to play out is high-powered analytics driving recommendations. You can read more about how Ashpool can assist without fully taking the wheel on our Features Page.