Don’t Send a Human To Do a Machine’s Job: A Note to Sales Teams

I see something on the horizon of sales that will change everything. In the USA, there are something like 18 Million sales people. We are a country of sales people.

I see something exciting, because I’m addicted to apps. Every day, I am witness to the largest demo day on the planet. Over 15,000 web and mobile apps launch each day. In the valley, my only discernible skill is that I’ve used more web and mobile apps than most people. 25,000+ at my last count. There’s no replacement for raw passionate obsession.

Automation Is Something Founders Care About

2 or 3 founders a week approach me to talk shop about automation. You see there’s a very real problem in Silicon valley and it’s the ratio of outbound:inbound sales folks in a company. Outreach can be extremely automated.

Right now, there’s over 1000+ Marketing and Automation technology companies.

If your VC is telling you that you should hire lots of outbound Sales Account Executives/Sales Development Representatives(SDR), be cognizant of the realities. If your VP of Sales knows less than 10% of the companies on that chart…….they should start studying it.

Ratio of Outbound:Inbound Sales Folks A ratio of 1:10 ratio of outbound:inbound SDR’s is extremely viable for companies pursuing huge markets with tons of customers.

Automation is Beautiful. It’s Real. Everything is Abstracted. You see, the level of automation we can have is surreal.

I’ve built an entire outbound CRM using Zapier. For the price of one Eastern European outsourced developer and a Zapier subscription, I can replace armies of outbound sales folks.

With tools like PathWright, I can train someone from High School to do epic things.

But wait, this isn’t human enough? It doesn’t matter, there’s even an API for adding human context. Don’t you worry.

Using BuzzSumo, I can automate small talk.

“Oh Hey Jenny, I saw your tweet about X. {Buzzsumo(input unique keywords from article that Jenny tweeted, return interesting article)} is something you might find interesting.”

You see, there’s no escaping what’s the reality. There’s many non-technical and technical jobs that will be replaced by API’s, crawlers, and code.

There’s even a programmatic human component for those 80% robotic, 20% human tasks. Check out API’s like 2Hive.

Google Sheets as a Database

Want to build a ghetto-quick non programmer required database and process leads? Just use Zapier to pipe the data into a google sheets.

Then pump BlockSpring Google Sheets Add-On all over it.

Don’t send a human to do a machine’s job.

In short, if you dream about apps the same way I do, tweet me.

If you’re fascinated with automation, want to empower your sales team, or want to nerd out about apps let’s chat.