The future belongs to the companies who are willing to invest in real, 1-to-1 , human-to-human interactions…it’s not about B2B or B2C, it’s about H2H, human-to-human. – Ryan Deiss, Co-Founder & CEO, Digital Marketer.

At Bee Digital, we focus our efforts on creating real relationships with real people, turning strangers into friends, friends into customers, and customers into brand advocates.

We can only do this by creating marketing strategies that are based on human psychology and the anticipated sales cycle, with communications that are personable, timely and have a clear goal.

However, in order to be efficient growth partners for our clients, we must achieve all of this at scale, and this is where there is conflict between the two main approaches to converting leads…

Machine selling vs the human touch

Let’s be absolutely crystal clear.

There is no higher converting way to turn a lead into a customer than to meet them in person, however travelling to meet leads is super inefficient in the long term, and can be damn expensive.

You can call, or even video call leads to retain the human touch while reducing the travel, but again, there’s only one call you can make at any one time, so unless you have an enormous sales team, scaling is impossible.

This is where automation and machine selling is key.

Let’s say you’re a door-to-door salesperson.

Your goal is always to get inside someone’s house because you know if you are invited in, there is a solid chance to convert.

You can only knock on one door at a time and have one conversation at a time. Nonetheless, you knock at a door. No answer.

Little do you know that had you been a this door just a few minutes earlier, there would have been a sale.

Sadly, the homeowner is mowing the lawn right now and can’t hear your knocks.

You see, this is why automation rocks.

With a well executed automation system in place, you can have multiple people knocking on multiple doors, at a time when they know the homeowner is home AND ready to listen to your pitch.

Same amount of time spent, many more doors, much better results.

Sounds great, so what’s the catch?

Think of these door knockers as robots.

They know when people are at home, they know how to knock on doors, heck they even know how to pitch a product, but when it comes to the finer points of a conversation, answering specific questions, getting over objections, they aren’t that great.

Sure, they can give it a good shot and many of the robots will make a sale, but they don’t have your ability to close, and they never will.

Wouldn’t your time be much better spent converting these super hot, ready to talk leads, rather than knocking on the doors hoping for an answer?

Combining machine sales with the personal touch

The solution to scaling and automating relational selling, is to create machine processes (eg. email automations, retargeting adverts, chat bots) that personalise content based on a website visitor’s behaviours – giving it that human touch. For example…

• Visited the ‘request a demo’ page but didn’t request a demo? Send an email offering some dates for an upcoming webinar
• Visited the pricing page but didn’t buy? Retarget with testimonials from customers about the great value the product has brought

But regardless of the machine approach taken, when dealing with businesses or schools where sales aren’t made online but in person, the goal MUST be to get someone on the phone or to join a Zoom call.

This is why we ensure all machine communications are personable, sent from a real person’s email address and have a clear goal, such as ‘book that demo’, handing over the reigns from bot to human at the point when they can have the biggest impact.

3 weeks to £60,000, the proof is in the pudding

We ran a 3 week campaign for a client that sells a £500 product to schools.

Traditional approaches had been to attend and speak at events, signing up 20-30 schools at a time. A reasonable return on investment.

But when no events exist, the approach was cold calling; high volume – low return.

Our strategy was slightly different, creating an automated lead machine that would build awareness of a problem, highlight the product as the solution, drive engagement, and ultimately encourage people to request a demo, handing over the control to the business owner.

The results were £60,000+ worth of sales qualified leads in 3 weeks, with a company that can convert 40% of leads into customers.

Why did it work?

We were able to target people with specific messages based on their interests and behaviours at a time that they were most ready to commit (creating a personal approach through machine automation).

Having all communications come from the key contact in the business, and the follow up sales call be delivered by the same person, helped to keep the message consistent with that 1-to-1, human-to-human feel.

Because at the end of the day, that’s what matters. We are not dealing with B2B or B2C, we’re dealing with human beings, H2H.

We absolutely must ensure that any campaign is personal and focused on building real relationships, but without automating certain aspects, it’s nigh on impossible to scale.

It’s about creating a blended approach that gives the best of both worlds – and produces predictable, consistent, scalable, results.

Do you want to discuss how we can do the same thing for your business? Get in touch and let’s chat!