About This Episode

Automation & personalization are all the rage these days.

Customers expect instant, but also personal interaction with your product, your company, and your website. If your company is going to perform, then your outreach and your engagement need to be able to meet the customer where they are at.

Ben Salzman and Kyle Williams run Dogpatch Advisors where they help companies increase revenue through outbound ops and data-driven sales techniques.

Data Sources

When it comes to the kind of data that you’re getting and using to make decisions, there are 3 main sources.

Data You Buy

This is exactly what it sounds like. It’s data that you acquire from a vendor.

Data You Outsource

Outsourcing the acquisition of data is not only a wise use of your budget but puts far less strain on your team. Say you want to look up companies employee count on LinkedIn in order to create a targeted outreach strategy.

Why waste your team’s’ time on something that mundane. Outsource it, get the data, and move on.

Data You Collect

Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to outsource or buy data, but rather to collect it. Some data is just too valuable or important to your bottom line. So you either automate the collection of that data, or you decide that it’s worth putting it on your team to collect it.

However you get your data, what is certain is that without the right data, at the right time, you’ll have a hard time putting together a solid outreach plan.

Using Intent Data

Intent data reduces the requirement of how far you need to go with personalization.

Personalization is far more accepted today. 5 years ago, if you were to search for something on Amazon, and then see an ad display for it the next day, you might feel like your privacy was violated.

But today? You’re just glad they’re showing you something relevant that is along the lines of what you were looking for. The same thing is happening in outbound.

Take Facebook for example. Let’s say you are meeting a new friend for dinner, and you see on their Facebook page that they like William Shakespeare.

You wouldn’t show up at dinner and immediately say, “I noticed on your Facebook page that you like William Shakespeare.” You might just casually drop a line from Othello. They may respond, “Oh, I didn’t know you like Shakespeare, I love him!” Then it’s off to the races, connecting over something that put in the work to find out.

And if they say nothing? At least you sounded smart.

So What?

So what does this all mean? Why all this focus on personalization and automation and scale? What does it mean for your company?

It all boils down to the customer. The bottom line is that you should be selling to customers the way that you would want to be sold to. You want relevance, we want personalization, and we want speed.

So do your customers.

If they feel like they’re not a priority, or that you’re using cookie cutter sales techniques with them, they’re far more likely to disengage and go somewhere else.

But if you can target them where they are, you’ll likely create a customer for life.

To learn more about Dogpatch Advisors, visit dogpatchadvisors.com and check out their previous episode. 

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