The human side to marketing automation.
“I’m only human!” came the cry from the desk of an old boss of mine.
He was a good boss and a good man, he just couldn’t say, ‘No’. The work would pile up onhis desk and when someone
chased an update, the cry would come…
“I’m only human!”
It’ll be his epitaph.
He has a point though. There are limitations to what we can do. You just need to know where to draw the line.
It’s like magic, but it’s not
Similarly, we can’t just keep piling work into an automation platform. One day it’ll cry...
“I’m not human!”
Perhaps not… but the results you get from your automation campaigns will say as much.
One of the biggest issues I see with marketing automation platforms is that they’re overestimated.
Yes, they’re revolutionising marketing but they’re not a magic wand to wave over your strategy. Automation platforms will not fill your sales funnel with
leads by themselves, nor resolve any lead generation issues.
You can’t just feed data, emails and forms in then expect results. You’ll be bitterly disappointed if you do.
At a very simple level, automation pulls a number of marketing functions together and provides intelligent data to your sales and marketing teams.
This insight into your buyer behaviours and needs is an invaluable result of automation and a major factor in its rapid rise.
It doesn’t and shouldn’t stop at that data, though. You still need a team of trained sales and marketing
professionals to take this data and use it strategically.
Automation platforms won’t use this data to shape future campaigns and to build a strong relationship with your customers.
Sure, an automation platform is intuitive but it can’t think, it can’t make suggestions and it won’t cry ‘I’m not human’, either.
Without a team of people feeding data in and a team of people pulling the data out… is nothing but an elaborate program.
Who are you selling to and who are they buying from?
It’s easy to get swept up in the capabilities of automation platforms. They’re vast.
What’s more difficult is understanding them and how they fit into your strategy.
We all know that buyers’ attitudes are changing and that you need to go with them. But there’s one very important thing about your buyers that hasn’t changed…
… “They’re still human!”
Your customers are buying from you, the human face of the company. Not the clever processes and technology you’ve put in place.
You’ve tracked them, you know what they’re up to on your website and what emails they’re reading. But you don’t know what they’re thinking, what they’re stalling on.
A client I recently worked with insisted that they didn’t want personal emails passing to the sales team. These are either ‘time wasters’ or ‘students’.
This is a perfect example...
Later in the campaign, the sales qualification criteria were altered and personal emails included. We found that a few of these ‘time wasters’ were using personal
emails to avoid corporate network firewalls. The platform gave us that data, the sales team spoke to them and did the rest.
Marketing automation will equip your sales team with some of the best leads and data they’ve ever had, but that’s only part of the story. The human voice
at the end of your buyers’ journey is so critical to campaign success.
The reality is, the sales role hasn’t changed. It’s just a lot more streamlined and that’s thanks to a program…
… but, without you, it’s nothing.