Year of the Chief Automation Officer?

We are entering a new, extraordinary phase of Automation

According to the 2020 Deloitte Study on "intelligent automation" (PDF above), there have been "great strides have been made to arrive in this brave new world of widespread intelligent automation. But the race to our robotic future is not quite won, because adoption does not guarantee added value."

From my own experience in the sales acceleration and development space, there has been an explosion in technological capabilities.

Source: David Dulany from Tenbound .

Here is June 2018, with close to 100 vendors.

Drumroll.....Here is the most recent landscape:

HOLY SHIT!

Controversial Opinion here - the ability of an employee to fully understand toolsets, deploy them deeply, and automate their day using their tech stack will be a greater determination of impact than skill levels.

Automation, including Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Low Code, AI, BPM management, Process mining, and many more categories are changing the business landscape in several ways:

• Improving efficiency and reducing costs: Automating repetitive tasks and processes leads to significant improvements in efficiency and cost savings. This can be particularly beneficial for businesses that rely on manual processes or have a large number of employees performing repetitive tasks aka most organizations on the planet.
• Enhancing data management and analysis: The art of decision-making includes the art of questioning. Automation helps businesses manage and analyze large amounts of data efficiently. This provides valuable insights for decision-making and strategic planning, allowing us to make better decisions, faster.
• Improving customer experience: Automation helps businesses improve the customer experience by automating communication and follow-up processes. As well as providing personalized recommendations, training, and offers based on their behavior. This is prevalent in B2C models and is starting to ramp up in B2B SaaS.
• Creating new job opportunities: Automation leads to the creation of new job opportunities, particularly in areas such as data analysis, automation design, RevOps, management, employee health, and digital marketing. The number one job according to LinkedIn is RevOps.
• Changing the nature of work: I am most excited about this one.? Automation changes the nature of work by eliminating repetitive tasks and processes, which can free employees to focus on more complex, higher-value activities. I imagine a day when sales reps can be "human at scale" - spending more time critically thinking about campaigns and having valuable conversations, vs executing activity.

Overall, automation is changing the business landscape by improving efficiency, reducing costs, enhancing data management, improving customer experience, creating new job opportunities, and changing the nature of work.

Barriers, Customer Success, and the Human Element

In the study above, there are two images that should raise your eyebrows:

Honestly, this surprised me.

On balance, organizations feel they are prepared to technically deploy these strategies, but the biggest barrier jump is "Resistance to Change"

This also explains why the Customer Success role has been exploding over the past few years and will continue to do so, alongside product-driven growth models.

Particularly in SaaS, the business risk has been rightfully moving over to the vendors' side. We (i.e. customers) expect to see our desired outcomes delivered over longer time frames, before signing an agreement and committing resources to change.

With fierce competition, there are often multiple vendors who share the same core feature set, and the one who wins delivered the outcome with the least amount of customer effort (Great book on this subject ).

This is not to say Account Executives will be relegated to glorified order takes. Rather, it's the opposite. AE's will have greater responsibilities in directing implementation, uncovering desired outcomes, being subject matter experts, and shepherding both internal and customer resources to deliver the win. This means working closely with CS teams both pre-sale and post-sale.

Post sales– CSM's will have to navigate process fragmentation, provide resources due to a lack of IT readiness, and overcome an org's resistance to change. Any CSM reading this already knows how hard change management is, even when there is executive alignment!

We know companies must rely on external resources and technology partners to stay competitive. However, they must also vastly improve and expand internal resources.

So, who is going to manage all of that and drive a coherent vision?

Enter the Chief Automation Officer

A Chief Automation Officer (CAO) can help a company implement automation strategies and technologies to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase competitiveness. A CAO can also help identify areas where automation can be applied and develop a plan to implement it, as well as oversee the integration of automation technologies into different business processes and systems.

Additionally, a CAO can also play a critical role in managing the impact of automation on the workforce, such as identifying new skills that employees will need to acquire and developing training programs to support them. Overall, a CAO can help a company stay ahead of the curve in terms of automation and drive significant business value.

Note: One clear metric is the ability of an org to scale ARR & LTV while reducing/maintaining CAC. An effective CAO will impact this significantly.

How can this help with Sales and SDR organizations?

A Chief Automation Officer (CAO) can help a company implement automation strategies and technologies to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase competitiveness. A CAO can also help identify areas where automation can be applied and develop a plan to implement it as well as oversee the integration of automation technologies into different business processes and systems.

Additionally, a CAO can also play a critical role in managing the impact of automation on the workforce, such as identifying new skills that employees will need to acquire and developing training programs to support them. Overall, a CAO can help a company stay ahead of the curve in terms of automation and drive significant business value.

Note: One clear metric is the ability of an org to scale ARR & LTV while reducing/maintaining CAC. An effective CAO will impact this significantly.

How can this help Sales organizations?

A Chief Automation Officer (CAO) can help a sales organization in a variety of ways, including:

• Automating repetitive tasks: Automation helps salespeople focus on high-value activities by automating repetitive tasks such as data entry, lead generation, and email follow-ups. There are a plethora of tools today that can automate pretty much every single task.
• Improving sales forecasting: Automation helps improve forecasting accuracy by automating data collection and analysis, which can be used to identify patterns and trends that can inform sales forecasting.
• Enhancing customer engagement: Automation helps enhance customer engagement by automating communication, alerting both sides when usage indicates issues/insights, as well as providing strategic recommendations - like altering best practices or driving adoption.
• Analyzing customer data: Automation helps analyzes customer data to identify patterns and trends that can inform sales strategies and tactics. For example, you may uncover the team is focused on a feature because it is used by the largest cohort of customers while another less-used feature drives more revenue and retention but is rarely deployed.
• Streamlining administrative sales processes: Automation helps streamline sales processes by eliminating manual steps and reducing errors, which can lead to faster sales cycles and improved productivity. Remember filling out a security questionnaire or sending a contract without something like Docusign? I get PTSD.

TL:DR

This year, take time to seriously consider a CAO that sits alongside the rest of the C-suite.