I Was Prospected By A Robot
Sales Prospecting Perspectives in pleased to bring you a guest post from one of our newer BDRs, Elizabeth Guerra.
…Okay, so that might not be entirely true. The robot was only looking for information, after all. It wasn’t technically a sales call. Maybe I should just tell the story.
Awhile back, prior to coming to work at AG, I was contacted by my cell phone company to take an automated survey. At the time, I was working at a market research firm where my job was to try to get businesses to take surveys much like the one I was being offered. Out of sheer curiosity about how my job was going to become obsolete, I started to take the survey. It was a truly bizarre experience. Any time I rated something below a 10 (10 was the highest), I was prompted with a tone and told to leave a message about why I had chosen that rating. I don't know how long the survey was intended to be, because I never finished it. It was just too weird.
“Automation” is a big word these days (and don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely good in a lot of instances). We have self-checkouts at stores, we can pay our bills online, and of course there’s always online shopping. It’s even possible to apply for a job and get rejected before another human ever lays eyes on the resume. All of these situations eliminate the need for human interaction. But one field that doesn’t benefit from going completely automated is the field of teleprospecting. You may leave more messages in a day with an auto-dialer and a recording pitching a product, but the qualified leads are going to come from having a human on both ends of the phone and having a conversation. The ability to ask another person further questions to clarify a situation to get the best overview is something that’s not going to come from leaving a message at the tone.