Marketers and salespeople like to debate about automating sales processes. As you know, automating marketing related workflows has proved to be one of the best things to happen to marketing in the recent few years. We have seen enormous changes in the way marketing has shifted focus from offline to online. We’ve seen how marketers are more aware of buyer’s decision making processes and how to nudge them towards their brand.
What we’ve also seen is, through all this, sales has remained almost oblivious to the changing marketing and selling tactics. Sales has been hesitant to go the way of marketing and adopt automation.
The debate goes on whether automating sales processes is the right thing to do.
The reasons why people believe so are:
- Sales persons are averse to this idea: You cannot blame anyone if automation comes across as a complicated system. I’m sure you’ve come across companies that tell you how they have X number of features more than competitors. Add to that the existing features, the plug-ins and the data graphs. We do make automation sound too heavy, don’t we? The downside of appealing to the marketers has led to aversion from the sales reps. Sales people aren’t usually the techno savvy types and naturally averse to this whole idea of adopting automation.
- Marketing Automation is universally a marketers’ domain: The email campaigns and social media marketing tools have led people to believe that automation only serves the marketing lords.
- Sales persons believe sales enablement software takes out the human touch out of prospecting and makes it mechanical: salespeople are the people who like to talk and meet people, IN PERSON. For them, automation is taking away an integral part of their job which is connecting with prospects on a one-on-one basis.
- They don’t want to be bogged down to desktops: Sales reps are like the nomads of the corporate world. They are constantly out there talking and meeting potential prospects with no time to spare. To them a sales automation system ties them down to their desktops, robbing of the precious time they could spend selling (or meeting targets).
- They are more focused on leads close to buying stage: Sales is more focused on leads that are close to the buying stage. This is against the principles of automation that concentrates more on the leads that are in the first stage of the buying cycle.
- Heavy reliance on CRM: For sales teams, CRM is the alpha omega for their activities. They have become so used to CRMs that they refuse to let go.
Sales enablement software is the sales answer to marketing automation. Sales enablement software has similar capabilities to those of marketing automation software, yet with a sales enablement approach.
