How to Boost Your Job Performance with Automation

The pandemic has relegated most of us into pixilated images on a Zoom call. While some activities will revert to a pre-pandemic state, most will not, making it harder than ever to build relationships and develop affinities.

Our job performance will be increasingly measured by a single metric: How much did you sell?

This is why it’s vital for salespeople and marketers to take advantage of the most advanced digital tools to enhance their performances, and why leaders need to make those technologies available to them.

It’s not easy. While many back-office tools such as ERP and supply chain management have already adopted AI-driven automation, the front office (sales, marketing and service) remains the last bastion of non-automated processes. 

Why? Sales and marketing people have dug in on the idea that their roles are more art than science. And they’ve clung jealously to the idea that their intuition and creativity are what differentiate them – which is true, only not in the ways they think.

Bringing science to customer experience

For example, most salespeople think they know the best reference example to bring to a sales call, usually because they’ve used the reference successfully in the past, or because they were themselves involved it the deal, and feel more comfortable talking about it.

But it turns out that machine learning and AI can do a better job of identifying the best sales references based on which ones have worked best for a particular industry or region or company size, using a more complete set of data. These suggestions can help salespeople increase their chances of closing a sale. And there are better criteria for determining the value of a reference than someone’s intuition. 

Likewise, marketers are convinced they know the best piece of creative to use for a given campaign – but again, they’re relying on a form of confirmation bias. An AI-driven tool can actually tell them which piece of creative is best suited for a given campaign because it has learned from the experiences of other marketers across the organization.

In each case, there’s still a lot of room – I’d even argue, need – for creativity: in developing the marketing creative, in telling the story, in explaining the “why” of a given pitch. AI simply gives them the best sales or marketing collateral at the right moment.

Marketers should be creative about branding, or about using feedback to adjust what a product or service should deliver to a customer, or how to describe the features of a given product. 

But salespeople and marketers should welcome a tool that takes variability out of their performance by letting a machine help them be better at their jobs.

Going full circle 

Today, organizations using the right suite of tools can break down traditional information siloes between sales, service, marketing, and advertising organizations. Those tools can provide marketers and salespeople with suggestions based on all the data at an organization’s disposal, as part of a single, engineered flow, with data from back-office systems like ERP and supply chain supplementing data contained in front-office data sets.

As customers expect to be seen holistically and as a person by the companies they do business with, sales and marketing professionals should expect their organizations to support their efforts at providing that level of service.

On one level, it’s not surprising that sales and marketing teams have resisted traditional sales and marketing “automation” tools. The only automation they provide are geared to managing and monitoring them or preventing them from downloading their contacts when they leave an organization. 

Today, organizations can turn that paradigm on its head. Sales and marketing leaders can provide their organizations tools that help salespeople sell more and marketers market more effectively, driving better results for their organizations – and for their employees’ own performance-based salaries.

I’d love to know what your experience has been in this regard. Have the older generation of sales and marketing “automation” tools helped your performance? Or do you agree that there’s room for a higher-level, more efficient form of automation to help goose your performance? 

Please let me know in the comments.