Proxima Sales reviews of current marketing tools and systems have been a source of much internal discussion of late. Like any growing firm Proxima Sales company goals would be advanced by tools that reduced or removed the repetitive and inefficient elements of the business building, sales process.
After a solid year of free trials, paid pilots, and various subscriptions to SaaS solutions of highly variable utility, support, and ease of cancelation , we have drawn a rather sad conclusion:
Currently marketing has been distracted from genuine marketing for measurable results by the automated tools that promise a personalized experience will deliver results with very little effort on the part of the marketer.
Tools are just that, tools. When the dust of social media - Twitter re-tweet trains, LinkedIn, Facebook groups, and HubSpot, LeadFuze, and other trending get-famous-quick robo-marketing solutions are evaluated from a distance, marketing will adjust, again.
When we wake up and find that potential clients still require education, information, motivation, and value, we’ll figure out how to make the tools work for us and recognize that there must be a thinking, real person with relevant expertise behind the automated marketing and viral PR tools and tricks.
As a quick example, I have been receiving very personalized and friendly emails from the CEO of a vendor who would like to do business with our company. I replied and asked specific questions about how their solution could work in our environment.
The next email from this CEO was not a reply. Instead, it was the next in the pre-loaded series of lead development emails they had cued up. Had that CEO read his email and/or delegated the actual human evaluation of responses to anyone on their team, they would likely have a new customer. Instead, they have an irritated prospect who now knows that there is no real person behind the curtain.
Wizards of Awe will always hang out in marketing and so will the people who will go to any length to get the metaphorical dog to push the lawn-mower rather than actually make, qualify, nurture, and close prospects on new business.
Five years or so from now, I think we’ll find that the auto-bot era has stacked up start-up casualties and demand for well qualified subject matter and sales experts will be in higher demand than ever.
As Rafe Esquith, a great, if under-rated thinker has said, “There are No Short-cuts.”
Kate Parker
kate@proxima-sales.com
Proxima Sales offers full service, human relationship based sales services to technology and professional services firms that offer best of class complex intangibles. We have teams in a number of industries including healthcare, financial services, IT services, IT security, digital marketing, and software.
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