What is this obsession with automation?

Sure, it applies to the world of consumer marketing and also what I would call ‘mass’ B2B.

The benefits of moving from manual to automatic processes across hundreds of thousands of contacts are obvious to all but the idiot.

But how much B2B is really dealing with such huge volumes?

Very little, I would suggest.

Even in very large B2B organisations, sales teams are usually divided into sectors, where their target audience might be hundreds, but probably little more.

So why automate contact with such small audiences?

How do sales people ever ‘get to know’ their target market if it’s all just churned out of the machine.

There’s a strong argument to say that automating at this level is unnecessary, lazy and fosters salesforces that are little more than order-takers.

They don’t really know their markets. They don’t really know what makes their prospects tick. And that means they’re never going to be in a position where they act as a persuasive sales voice to anything other than deals that were going to walk in the door anyway.

Do it manually. Connect with prospects on LinkedIn. Show them you know what you’re talking about and would be a compelling supplier-partner. Show them you are different/better than the rest.

So… practice what you preach they say!

We’ve been at HannoverMesse this week, the global industrial tech fair. We haven’t been lazy by doing some automated send out. We’ve been reaching out to people we want to meet in precisely the individual, careful and meaningful way I’ve described.

The result? Great meetings. New connections. New learnings. Good business.

Nothing beats the personal touch.