Sales POP - Purveyors of Propserity
Sales Automation: Back to the General Store
Blog / All About CRM / Apr 9, 2019 / Posted by Nikolaus Kimla / 5846

Sales Automation: Back to the General Store

0 comments

“The more things change, the more they remain the same.”
—Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

Our grandparents often told us that, back in their day, they knew how to get things done, and that today, with all our complexity and complication, we’re seriously lost.

Well that might be true…but in the case of technology, sales automation will be bringing us back to something very beloved in our collective memory: the town General Store.

Believe it or not, it all falls under the topic of data automation.

Improvements Only the Beginning

We’ve seen many improvements in recent years with regard to data. An example is the business card scanner which we ourselves at Pipeliner have added to our mobile CRM solution. Reading the card is a simple scan. From that scan, contact fields can be auto-populated within Pipeliner. In the old days, you might have attended a trade show and come home with dozens of business cards that you’d then have to manually enter into your contact database. Very fortunately, those days are well behind us.

But scanning business cards is only the beginning. The data on that card might not be totally correct due to printer errors. Or, the person or business might have moved. If you wait a bit to contact them, the person might have even changed companies. You’re lucky if the person hasn’t changed phone numbers, too.

Unprecedented Data Access

Fortunately, though, we have unprecedented data access today. Data providing services, to which you can subscribe, grab data from other databases and off the internet so that your database can be automatically updated.

Previously you had to log into such a provider and purchase data. This was before the advent of APIs (discussed in our last article). Now everything is done through an API. With a technology called Webhooks, data can be pulled and pushed. The kind of tasks that were in the last few years long and complex are becoming incredibly fast and easy.

Data is not only grabbed from the internet, but that data can be updated, enriched, deduplicated and merged.

Importance of Data Automation

Marketing costs can eat into a company’s budget. When contact details are incorrect, that means the email you send will bounce, which is a waste of time, effort, and money. It is even more so when you’re sending physical items such as letters or packages.

With data, we do have to make one fundamental assumption: that the person named is indeed the person. Beyond that, it shouldn’t matter where that person lives or how often they move. The only thing that matters is, how can we keep that data current—mail, email, and phone—and use it correctly and efficiently?

Today that’s the point of data automation—to keep that data current.

The Near Future

I believe that a next step, coming in the near future, will be data history. That means not just the current data, but the evolution that data has gone through. Where has the person worked before? Where have they lived? What kind of social media interaction have they had?

I also believe that connections and relationships will also be available. It’s not just about the person you have on file, but their connections—who they are and how they are related. This isn’t simply contact connections, such as those shown on LinkedIn or Facebook, for these aren’t actual relationships. For example, I have close to 8,000 contacts on LinkedIn, but am I really connected to those people? No. But in the future, someone will be able to find out who is actually connected to me, who has interacted with me.

Such details mean that the salesperson can customize a product or service for a prospect, and hit it right on the mark.

We’re definitely on the way there. We can now keep the information up-to-date and enrich it. Next will be history and connections as well.

Privacy

Of course, along with such innovations, privacy is an enormous issue, which we’ll be taking up in a separate article. The General Data Protection Regulation—GDPR—is already in place in Europe, and will soon roll out worldwide. As businesspeople, we certainly want access to as much data as possible, but at the same time as citizens, we certainly don’t want our privacy violated.

Customer Insight and the General Store

Going back to the beginning of our article, it seems that in very appropriate ways, we’re going back to the General Store of American history.

What are we looking for with all this automation? Customer insight. And nobody had more customer insight than the proprietor of the General Store.

That proprietor always knew their customer. Not only the customer, but the customer’s family—children, spouses, and relations. They would greet a customer with, “Hey, Mary, how are you? How is John doing? How are the kids? By the way, I’ve reserved a couple of bottles of bluing that I knew you needed, and I kept aside a couple sticks of that penny candy that I know your kids love.”

That proprietor had a 360-degree view of their customers. They knew everything about them. What is amazing is that we now depend on databases to keep track of customer data—but everything that proprietor knew was right in their head.

Where We’re Going

This is where we’re headed, with data automation. When someone contacts you personally and has insights into your issues and preferences, how much difference does it make from someone just cold-calling you and giving you a pitch for a product or service you may or probably don’t need?

Our product Pipeliner is already quite flexible with our business card scanner, data enrichment, data migration, data cleansing, duplication checker and relationship mapping.

In 2 or 3 years, who knows? We may very well have the Pipeliner General Store.

About Author

CEO and partner of pipelinersales.com and the uptime ITechnologies, which I founded in 1994 and has since played a significant role in the development of the IT-environment. pipeliner is the most innovative sales CRM management solution on the market. Pipeliner was designed by sales professionals for sales professionals and helps close the gap between the requirements of C-level executives for transparency and the day-to-day operational needs of field and inside sales. I am also the founder and Initiator of the independent economic platform GO-AHEAD!, which orientates itself on the principles of a free marketplace in terms of liberal and social responsibility. Connecting people, the trust of business leadership in terms of values such as freedom, self-responsibility, and entrepreneurial spirit, and strengthening their awareness in order to create a dynamic boost within the economy triggered through spontaneity, all stand for the initial ideas surrounding GO-AHEAD! I studied in Los Angeles and Vienna and received my Masters's Degree in 1994. I am married and have 3 children My Specialties are in: Sales Management, Sales CRM Software, CRM Cloud Solutions, SAAS, Business Strategy, Software Development, "Pipeline Management", Social responsibility, outbound sales, b2b sales, inside sales, sales strategy, lead generation, sales process, entrepreneurship, coaching, mentoring, speaker, opportunity management, lead management, Austrian School of Economics

Author's Publications on Amazon

This is a practical manual covering the vital subject of Sales Management. I firmly believe that sales are the most important profession for dealing with today’s turbulent world and Econo my, for salespeople create wealth and produce peace. But salespeople need a competent, stable leader—and…
Buy on Amazon
Inside this eBook, you’ll discover a series of chapters dedicated to some of the most important areas facing sales today. From the sales process definition to measurement, lead generation, and proven sales techniques, this comprehensive eBook will provide you with the information you need to…
Buy on Amazon
A common term in sales today is EQ, which stands for “emotional I.Q.” It means the skill a salesperson has in reading emotions and utilizing them in sales. It means empathy and a number of other abilities. The short version is, it’s an I.Q. when…
Buy on Amazon
People are smart to question the future of automation, for it has become part of everything we do. With the quantity of applications and technology around us, we yet still crave more. We become convinced of its power when our package is delivered from Amazon…
Buy on Amazon
Sales management isn’t a simple subject by any means. But at the same time, it does have some basic and somewhat simple fundamentals—and that is what we are bringing to you with this book. First come pain points of sales management, and how to overcome…
Buy on Amazon
Today the Internet has transformed a seller's market into a buyer's market and author Nikolaus Kimla states that the role of sales has never been more crucial. It is now time to give salespeople the role they factually can play: entrepreneurs within the enterprise. They…
Buy on Amazon
This is our public declaration of the intentions behind Pipeliner, and our objectives and motives for the product and for our company. Behind the development of that CRM application and, in fact, behind everything we do, we have a real cause. The story begins with…
Buy on Amazon
For the future, there must be a perfect balance of humans and technology. You have to have the perfect technology, andthen the perfect human being in application, performance and presentation. Today and into the future, it’s a 50-50 balance. In the past it was perhaps…
Buy on Amazon
The salespreneur is based on the concept of the entrepreneur. Before we can explain the salespreneur, you have to have some understanding of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur plays a crucial role in any economic system. The entrepreneur seeks out information that can be utilized for…
Buy on Amazon
A seasoned captain would never leave port without a competent navigator. In a similar way, a sales manager might be a total ace at "commanding the ship" – at inspiring and coaching sales reps, pointing out and getting agreement on making quotas, and keeping everyone's…
Buy on Amazon
Comments

..
..
.
Sales Process Automation
.
This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this website you are giving consent to cookies being used. For information on cookies and how you can disable them, visit our privacy and cookie policy.