Amy: The first thing that was on the list
that I had was this idea of having too
much automation in the sales process.
What are your thoughts,
is it possible to have too much
automation in your sales process?
James: Absolutely.
I definitely have conversations with a
lot of folks that want to over automate.
And at the end of the day, humans are what drive the brand
behind your business and give you a competitive edge.
Automation can give you a competitive
edge to a certain benchmark, right?
Once you get to a certain point, you can over automate.
Human beings need to be able to do their
job and communicate with other human beings
at other businesses, especially in sales.
If you're trying to automate an entire sales
process, it's not going to be a successful sales
process, unless it's just, just self-service.
And that works for you.
For some people it does.
Where it's just self service.
They don't need a sales team.
It's a simple product.
Maybe it's a very low ticket price.
That might work.
But when it's a more complicated solution where they,
you have a lot of competitors out on the market selling
a similar solution, you've got to have a high quality
sales person to do their magic, which is selling and
telling them why your solution is going to be an effective
solution for solving the specific problem that they have.
Automation simply won't do that.
So there is a point where a human being needs to
come in, do the work that they're paid to do, be
the brand for your business, and drive revenue.
That is their job.
Automation simply can't do that.
And again, the topic of AI, right?
I was having a conversation earlier and one
of our Slack channels like at what point is
is just AI talking with AI, between different
businesses an AI is just doing business, right?
You know, they have solutions for, okay.
We can automate your sales emails.
Okay.
Then we have solutions for, Oh, we can automate responses
to sales emails and figure out how to filter them out.
Like, at one point that becomes completely useless.
And it's kind of hilarious to me.
Like maybe we live in a world like
that some day, but I hope not.
Amy: Hmm So where do you think the balance is?
What's a good balance of using automation in
your sales process, but not using it too much?
James: I think that as an operations person or a sales ops
person, you have to think about it from the perspective
of what's going to make better use of your team's time?
Where can automation trim down time for your team?
That is going to look different in a lot of
different scenarios based on your process.
But a few things are going to be: a lead comes to your
website They fill out a form right That element all that
information all the data input that should be automated.
That saves your team time, right?
Automated put in your CRM, hopefully
Close, then it's in the system.
Again, another element of automation might be trigger an
email sequence, give them the opportunity to schedule with
your salespeople, without them having to write an email.
Again, speaking from an inbound sales process.
Saves your team time, nothing slips through the cracks.
Those folks are getting those emails so that they can engage
because they showed buying intent, saves their team time.
So elements like that.
You should think about automation as, how can I remove
clutter from really minor tasks for my sales team,
that they shouldn't have to do themselves so that
they can use their energy and their bandwidth to do
what they do best, talking to people, communicating
with people in a way that's driving next steps.
Amy: How would you use Close to automate
certain parts of your sales process?
James: Prioritization, first of all.
So getting those leads into the
system, automating that element of it.
Someone fills out a form wherever you're getting your
leads from you're running ads, pumping them into Close.
Leads come into the system and you're
prioritizing them based on specific criteria.
Typically, you're going to be capturing some level
of information from the lead on your form, on an ad.
You're going to be able to qualify and
prioritize based on specific criteria.
What we'll do, I'll help a lot of
folks in the sales process do this.
We do this ourselves.
We kind of figured out who ICP is, right?
Our ideal customer profile.
And we bucket those folks into a priority Smart View.
These are the folks that should always have attention.
You should be calling these folks.
If they're not organically scheduling with
you, you should always have an eye on them.
That is a major element of the inbound process that
I help folks implement in Close on a regular basis.
And at that point, your salespeople get to go in there
with hyper-focus and do their job extremely well and engage
these people who they know are typically going to convert
as a high quality customer, and hopefully a higher ticket