Why the human touch is vital to the sales process

In such a digitised world, why is the human touch still so vital to the sales process?

A winning combination

I believe (that for most, but not all unless your platform is really commoditised off-the-shelf that sales automates itself!), that sales and marketing should no longer be standalone entities. The two should work in harmony – sales needs a marketing engine to fuel it with leads, and marketing needs sales to qualify & convert the business.

For a lot of businesses that have more of a technical, educational or consultative sales process, (like many of you operating in the SaaS, MSP or ISP market will find), the human touch is absolutely fundamental to qualify, nurture and win business.

Getting the human involved in the process as early as possible will ensure your marketing spend isn’t wasted, and that your marketing activity is refined to continually improve your messaging & lead engagement.

Build a systemized conveyor belt of activity. Imagine a factory – step by step consistent workflow of actions that all of your target prospects follow, with automated multi-touch marketing AND sales actions mapped to timing intervals.

What should I expect from my humans in the process?

Always be learning

Unless you’re selling hot cakes, it will be a time consuming, lengthy and challenging process to target and follow-up target prospects. If you have a well targeted specific audience that you need to be doing business it, it takes a lot of graft to build awareness and engagement with that audience. But hey, that’s sales.

But, just because you can’t sell every time you lift the phone doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be moving your relationships with prospects forward. Identify mini-goals that you would consider as milestones in moving a prospect through the pipeline – importantly getting them ever closer to the ‘win’.

The accuracy and depth of information you hold on your prospects are absolutely fundamental insights that can define the success of a campaign. With answers to key question criteria, you will not only be able to better qualify prospects in or out (and more quickly), but be able to sell to them more intelligently based on key measures like budget expectations, current contract end dates or pain points they have with their incumbent service provider.

Maintain and grow those insights – and be sure to use them intelligently and timely within your sales follow-ups. A good CRM should help you with that structure, presenting the information to your sales team at the right time.

Right, let’s get some people on this…