How Automation Can Help
Automation presumably saves time, but if you’re messy with it, you can break the most important part: Relevancy.
The early stages of automated emails felt bland and impersonal. As more teams embraced automation with better technology, the ability to include merge and placeholder and drop down fields made for a much better buying experience. That’s all table stakes now.
And the maturity of automation tech has exploded. You get targeted ads across any platform based not only on your browsing history, but the browsing history of those around you. Your Netflix knows you so well, they can change featured programs automatically according to your preferences.
But those features only get you into the game. How do you use automation in new ways or new use cases to create a truly impressive and enabling experience, one that sets you apart from your competitors?
Part of this is about correctly framing your ideal role AND your buyer’s ideal role. Buying has changed so much in the last 10 years that unless you build your strategies around buyers, you’ll fail. That means changing your mindset from being a “seller” or “vendor” to being a “buyer coach” and accepting this incontrovertible truth: Only buyers can close deals, not sellers.
So your objective with automation is to enable buyers to sell for you, to close deals between meetings. Do that and you’ll get better results from the resources you have, from dramatically shortened sales cycles to huge leaps in close rates.
Relevancy Versus Automation
The popularity of software automation in the sales world rose rapidly because it can reduce the risk of human error, increase efficiencies, and decrease costs. Automation is about making better use of human capital! However, with the influx of so many automated sales tools, managers struggle to differentiate between mundane tasks they can automate and those that require the human touch. Every interaction with your potential buyers needs to be meaningful, especially since most of the buyer journey happens outside of meetings with vendors.
Relevancy represents the best way to establish trust and rapport with your prospective buyers when you aren’t in the room. You can position yourself as a problem solver, demonstrating your resourcefulness and understanding of their specific issues and needs and be authentic by showing your genuine desire to help them achieve their desired outcome all through automation.
Automated Sales Demos: The Perfect Marriage
Your ultimate goal is to deliver the right message to the right prospect at the right time. In order to do this, you need to assess your target buying audience, understand their interests, and engage them with the content you already know they will find useful. You need a blending of automation and personalization, and automated demos give you the best of both worlds.
There are six core demo types that SEs need to be aware of, but you can automate four of them. In basic terms, an automated demo will ask questions to gauge customer interest as part of the discovery process. The viewer will identify their role in the buying process and what topics are interesting to them. The platform creates a tailored demo going more in-depth on the topics they have flagged by pulling in pertinent information from your library of pre-recorded video demos. Customers get the information important to them without becoming oversaturated and driven away. This allows the customer to curate content they will be viewing.
What Demo Automation Software Can Do
- Qualify or disqualify leads, mimicking pre-sales reps: Prospective buyers that engage in demos are 34% more likely to become opportunities. If they share the demos, they are 81% more likely to become buyers.
- Identify stakeholders organically: You make demos to be shared. They become vehicles to find stakeholders quickly.
- Help you learn about stakeholders’ needs: Stakeholders will view the content that matters most to them in the demo, which will help you see where their needs lie.
- Check understanding: You can use demos to check stakeholders’ understanding at each buying process step. You can identify potential roadblocks and issues that need to be clarified.
- Track everything to get accurate metrics on your process: You can see the stakeholder insights from their engagement. We call this demolytics. You will see who is viewing the demos, how they engage, what will reach them, and who they bring in as well.
- Speed up purchase decisions, minimizing risk: Your buyers can engage on their terms, easily build business cases, and make purchase decisions quickly. Even if they opt not to go with you, you will enable them to make that decision without wasting an entire sales cycle.
- Integrate to ease workflow: The software works through sales engagement and CRM technology to minimize disruptions for your SEs.
We are firmly in the Digital Age, where everything is automated, but people miss the human component. Digital personalization can transform your approach from a sales-driven strategy to a buyer enablement one. Instead of selling your product, you will start to understand your buyers, their journey, and how you can be part of their solution. You can leverage technology to get more personalization than ever before. You will stand out against your competition, putting yourself in a position to win for yourself and your clients.
