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How Top Sales are using Automation with Personalization to get ahead

By Vahid Haghzare, Director &
Armie Garcia, Marketing Associate
Silicon Valley Associates Recruitment

One of the top IT Recruitment Agencies in Hong Kong, Dubai, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Singapore, and Japan, SVA Recruitment is an IT and employment agency that provides jobs, executive search, and recruitment services.

Introduction

Today, almost everything is fast-moving, systematized, and profitable because of the digital technology revolution

The influence of digital has been present across all industries during the past few years, especially Sales and IT Recruitment where customer-facing professionals now have an abundance of ways to obtain leads and prospects online, in bulk, and in volume.

Silicon Valley Associates Recruitment has personally benefited and rode the waves of these technologies to our advantage. Our IT Recruiters have multiple online methods for searching and meeting the right candidates in our markets that can match our clients’ requirements in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Singapore.

But one issue that more digitalized sales have led to is the obvious loss of personalization- the ability to create a personal touch that fits each individual customer or contact.

So, SVA Recruitment recently asked some of our sales candidates earlier this month for advice. We specifically spoke to those who have been top sales performers in their jobs in the last two years, with the revenue numbers to prove it on their CV.

Below, they explained how they are keeping things personal with the customer, whilst using these technologies and tools to automate driving through new sales prospects, and ultimately profits.

Automation Software Today

In the Covid era, digital marketing has become an integral part of every industry, and software automation has become an essential part of this process.

People can now automate almost anything easily - even the simplest task can like making a social media calendar to schedule posts to the most complicated task like now be automated.

Looking further ahead AI advancements will only accelerate this process.

During the pandemic, company spending on automation tools and technology went up, and by 2025, the automation software market may reach more than $10 million USD at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.7%.

Automation’s popularity with businesses is down to it being cost-efficient and increasing productivity whilst lessening human error. It creates more valuable time for human capital to prioritize big-picture projects that need more attention, rather than waste time on insignificant, repetitive tasks.

Automation’s Popularity in Sales

Automation was consistently brought up by our top-performing sales candidates, who set up campaigns frequently to reach more, qualified prospects in less time.

Popular tools included helping to automatically message and follow up customers, advanced features which helped work smarter by narrowing their prospect targets, and others that provided score leads, recorded and view interaction history for future reference, and create automated process flow.

Lastly, some of the most mentioned tools had nothing to do with automation. Our top-billing sales candidates liked to use software to look at and analyze their sales processes in minute detail, spotting possible issues that will smoothen the next customer’s journey in their created process.

Importance of Personalization

Our top billing sales were unanimous in their belief that despite all the automation being deployed in their day-to-day, sales is uniquely focused on the customer- a human being- and therefore requires equal time providing human attention, to make sure that the customer receives quality service and communication.

All the sales we spoke to were clear that, you need to make sure that you as the human, the salesperson, are driving the software and its automation, and that it is NOT driving you.

Automation software and tools were described as like a car, or the Iron-Man suit. The salesperson is the driver or the user. But there must be a human in the seat who is writing the actual messages, responses, campaign setups, etc. The software is nowhere near the stage of self-driving vehicles or auto-pilot, where the salesperson does not need to lift a finger. Well, not yet anyway….

Secondly, hyper-personalization was a consistent point that was brought up by these sales. The use of first names, last names, location, employer name, school, and even personal interest ‘tags’ were helping them to really stand out, grab attention and create instant connections, at scale with the use of automation to help execute.

Lastly, people only buy from people. The software and automation can help up to a certain point, to get the heavy lifting top-end of the funnel part off your plate. But once the prospect shows interest and becomes a lead, it becomes all about getting personal, interactive using your soft skills, getting facetime as soon as possible, and start creating the relationship that leads to trust and sale. The customer needs to be interacting with a human sooner rather than later.

Summary

In this generation where technology is everywhere, it is important that companies and businesses remain that personal touch.

Personalization makes all the difference. It makes your prospects feel special and it is important that they are given enough attention.

If you are a top-performing sales candidate and are considering, feel free to reach out to SVA Recruitment for a confidential conversation, or check out our latest jobs here. Not all our jobs are advertised, so would be worth having a call in any case.

If you are an employer who feels you can provide a better environment, feel free to browse our current candidates who may be feeling burnout and are open to new opportunities here.

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Silicon Valley Associates is ideally positioned to support the continual demand from tech companies and IT Departments looking to hire in Hong Kong, Asia, and Worldwide. Please let us know if you would further advise on the above topic or your hiring needs