The power of automation
Don’t you love serendipitous discoveries? This is a story of one such discovery when an unassuming automation went on to give us one of the highest returns on investment over time. It is from almost a decade ago, from my previous startup. It was early days; we had set up our inbound engine and were figuring out ways to scale.
As a company, one of our core values was transparency and we wanted the entire company to have a pulse on what is happening . We wanted everyone in the company to understand our customers - what is their persona, what is their pain point, where do they come from etc. This was a time when no code platforms was not a thing and sales operations meant different things. We got an intern to write some code that would send a mail to the entire company when a sales rep won a deal, congratulating them and sharing all the information about the deal - deal size, what was their pain point, location etc
While transparency was the goal, this led to to some other remarkably good outcomes. Sales Reps loved the limelight and added more information about deals. The company appreciated the efforts of the sales reps in converting deals and it lead to a healthy cycle. The overall quality of data in our CRM increased manifold and almost everyone had clear visibility into the sales pipeline.
Many years later, I personally made a transition from engineering to heading the marketing team, another serendipity. That’s a story for another time though. And during this phase this automation came back to help my team and me tremendously. With detailed information about pain points, location and the customer we were discovering cohorts and language that customers used and understood. It helped us message and position our product better and run targeted campaigns.
We went on to do a whole bunch of automations to improve our GTM engine, but this was one of the simplest ones that had a great impact on the organisation. When the sales rep discovered that the data they captured was being appreciated, it just became a habit. In Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Persuasion, this checked all the boxes on reciprocity. The “What is in it for me” after a deal is closed went away. The product team loved the availability of data to make better decisions, the customer success team were able to take over deals with ease.
Automate your sales workflows
A lot of sales workflows can be automated with ease these days with integrations and umpteen no code platforms. If your team works on Slack, it is incredibly easy to integrate your Slack and your CRM using Luru. Do checkout our workflows ideas on how to automate your sales processes. But if you are looking for that first automation to get started, I would suggest you start with the one above.
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