How I converted to marketing automation

After ten years at this infernal pace, I told myself that it was not possible to continue like this.

“A good product or service should be able to sell itself…” Wrong!

I realized that something that my engineering school had instilled in me (thanks to Arts et Métiers!) was branded deep inside:

“A good product or a good service must be able to sell itself.”

Indeed, I’m going to say it a bit bluntly, but I didn’t “believe” in salespeople and even less in marketing. I thought that:

• Sales people don’t understand anything about what they are selling (in service), they are just a waste of time, when they are not there to lie to the prospect.
• Marketing is there to embellish poor quality products and services.

I think that even today, many engineers fresh out of school think that.

Dare to question yourself

How did I make my conversion to marketing automation and become a marketing advocate? With a lot of soul-searching and a good dose of humility. I discovered a little later that my preconceptions were as wrong as thinking that nuclear physics is bad because it led to the H-bomb. This is the eternal debate about the usefulness of science and its “supervision”.

“Science without conscience is the ruin of the soul

Rabelais’ credo is also mine. I started by doing more and more business, and I made a business like the services I was selling: quality.

A business :

• where we don’t lie to the customer ;
• where I prefer to give free advice than to sell a day’s work;
• where I don’t sell what I can’t do.

And if you put in place the right indicators, the right values and the right compensation, you can also have sales people who do the same thing.

Techniques to focus on efficiency

By dint of doing business, I have come to understand my prospects and clients very well, their expectations, and the different phases they go through before buying services from me. I saw that some of them were repeated with a strange constancy, and that even if personalization is the key, some answers were always the same (“How does a CRM project go?”). To save time, I started writing down those answers. And that allowed me to treat my prospects with the same quality, but much faster… and reach many more. And without knowing it, like Mr. Jourdain (yes Molière, remember?), I was marketing:

• I mapped my targets (we would call them “buyer personas” today);
• I identified their intellectual path, their doubts, their questions (we would talk about “customer journey” or “lead life cycle”);
• I tried to propose answers automatically (we would talk about “marketing automation“).

All this to say that the most advanced marketing and sales techniques can either be good or bad for you. It depends on how you use them, and how you drive them.