Smarter Automation: Maximizing Efficiency Without Losing the Human Touch

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Hey everybody, welcome to a new episode—well, a new series that we're going to be diving into regarding automation and holistic marketing.  

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So for the next few episodes, we're going to be diving in, answering some questions, and yeah, doing a deep dive into automation and holistic marketing systems and what we can do to improve those.  

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First episode of the series, we're talking about just smarter automation—so how do we get efficient without losing the human touch?

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How we can use automation to improve marketing, our sales, and our customer experiences without making it feel too robotic.  

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So the first question set is for you:  
Which repetitive marketing and sales tasks are ideal for automation in the first place?

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Sure. You know, things like email sequences, lead scoring, re-engagement campaigns, drip campaigns—things with email, you know, that's a good candidate for sure.  

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Also things with content scheduling, you know, like publishing posts on multiple platforms automatically at a set time and day.  

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Even recycling evergreen content—post it multiple times, right? Just to keep your socials active and the algorithm primed.  

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Registration reminders, post-event follow-up—things related to webinars, events, and things like that.  

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Marketing and sales handoffs—anything where you collect information from marketing about the lead and then move it to sales.  

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Maybe you prepopulate a deck or some sort of handoff material—that is something good to automate, as well as other tasks, right?

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You know, tools like Zapier and Make, and now with the addition of AI, you can do all sorts of automation like taking meeting notes and providing action items for your sales reps or even filling out customized pieces of the sales decks and proposals.  

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So yeah, tons of things there.

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Yeah great, great. And when we're doing this, how do you avoid being too reliant on the automation, on these workflows?  

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How do you do that without losing the personal connection with the leads and customers? How do you like balance that human side and automation side?

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Yeah, you want to take that one?

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Yeah sure. For sure. I mean, you need to blend it with the human touch that you add to your venture, right?  

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I mean you wouldn't delegate certain things to an assistant. I always tell people use your workflow with a bit of touch of AI because AI makes decisions for you—  

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but it's just exactly—just treat it as any other assistant that you're onboarding into a role or your company.  

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Just delegate the first steps to filter it out exactly to you and what would you actually take on in any client interaction.  

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Just don't over-automate processes because it takes away the empathy that makes a business—or a leader—a leader.  

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I mean, just try to automate whatever you would delegate to an assistant that you're hiring or trying to recruit for a certain effort.  

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And definitely don't copy and paste—make it very intentional.  

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There are certain workflows that work for specific requests, specific cases, and it also challenges founders and companies to know and learn about themselves.  

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It's not only the quantitative data, it's the qualitative data, behavior, and whatnot.  

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As you learn from your ICP, you can then learn how to route it to an automated system that can make your life easier.  

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Because workflows at the end of the day should just make your client experience better—make their lives easier but also make your lives easier as a business.  

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You're still operating a business, wearing a bunch of hats.  

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So also look at it from your perspective as to what would I have to have contact with in terms of client interaction.  

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And I would just divide and conquer with the automation.  

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I would never put it all on automation for sure.  

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Everyone's talking about automation these days, but automation is only as effective as the strategy behind it.  

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At 08, we are experts at designing and implementing automation that's built uniquely for your organization.  

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Whether it's streamlining marketing and sales processes, improving customer experiences, or optimizing operations, we eliminate inefficiencies.  

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Curious how smarter automation can grow your bottom line?  

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Check us out at 8.agency, where you can book a free strategy call with one of our experts today.  

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Yeah, I like the term *automate tasks, not relationships*, right?  

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Like focus on automating things that can be repetitive, but not the human interactive side.  

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Data entry, scheduling, lead scoring, follow-up reminders are great—but the human element is really, really important.  

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People want to interact and hear from people, not from robots.  

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So yeah, I totally agree.  

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What are the biggest risks of over-automation?  

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How do we fall into those, and then how do you avoid them?

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I think going back to what I said—over-automating takes away empathy, which then influences emotion, which is what drives decision-making in a bunch of industries.  

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Mostly when it's heavy industries, like healthcare, luxury, retail, right?  

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So I think that's the biggest downfall of over-automating.  

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What you could do to avoid it though—again, challenge yourself to learn more about your ICP and your clients.  

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Try to teach the workflow. And I say teach the workflow—you can add AI to it and it becomes better over time.  

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Models are becoming smarter by the day, learning better about your own situation and environment based on behavioral data.  

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We're accustomed to numbers, and people think that's what's going to get them there.  

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But a lot of this is driven by emotion and behavior.  

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So learn about behavioral data.  

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How can you do that? Measure the type of keywords that you get most often, the kinds of cases you get most often.  

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Train the model—not a script—but train it with the sort of empathy that you treat the situation with.  

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Always write it to a human.  

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People are very visual, and with everything coming out, attention span is really short.  

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So always try to add, write to a human in some sort of UI—either at the end of an email, or as part of the chatbot.  

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That brings back trust.  

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People are becoming smarter about recognizing AI because it's very saturated.  

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Just try to make sure they know—hey, I know you know this is a robot, but you can still talk to a human.  

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The robot is only going to take your request and route it to the right human who will help you solve the problem.  

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I think that increases trust.  

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It’s learning from my issue, from historical data, and it’s going to get me to the person who can solve my issue.  

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And if a robot can help me with my problem, that’s great—it makes it more efficient for both ends.  

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But try to teach it how to learn from different problems so you can route it to the right person.  

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If it can be fixed without a person—amazing.  

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It’s a win-win for everyone.  

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But people, at the end of the day—when it comes to even orders, returns, money—care.  

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It’s an investment besides time.  

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Always route it to a person—but the *right* person.  

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That’s what I would say.  

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Always suggest making things very clear to people.  

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People are becoming smarter in recognizing these systems.  

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So how do you stay ahead and make sure they know that you know?  

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That you're also working toward making their experience less high-touch—with people—because that takes time.  

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So how can you divide and conquer with automation, but not overdo it to the point that it's a dead end?  

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I find that a lot.  

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I do chatbots a lot, and I have a bunch of issues with different types of situations.  

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At the end of the day, I always reach a dead end.  

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When that end comes—be one step ahead.  

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Always have a human behind it.  

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And as a founder and company, you’re also challenged to really train your staff in certain areas as well.  

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You cannot be relying on AI or workflows if you don’t really know what you’re doing at a process level.  

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It makes you also have your process in place, right?  

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Yeah, that’s what I would say.  

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I love that.  

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Yeah, when done well, it can make the experience *more* personalized, not less.  

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But that requires a lot of intentionality, knowledge, and testing things out.  

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And playing around with it, for sure.  

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No, that’s great.  

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All right, so how can automation help us speed up or make things more efficient when we’re nurturing a lead into a client?  

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How can that help speed things along?

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Yeah. Again, it’s a situation where maybe if they’re really high-intent, human intervention might be more appropriate.  

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But in general, it helps us create content for each stage of the customer journey and improve response times.  

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Automation can help with an instant reply through an email autoresponder.  

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Even if you hook AI up to your “Contact Us” form to craft a response—or at least a draft a sales rep could send—that helps personalize and automate those responses.  

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Social media, landing pages—all these things can be done faster.  

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Including replies, scalability, handling large volume of interaction simultaneously.  

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Support—for example, chatbots—ensuring efficiency even as the business grows.  

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Scalability is definitely something important to keep in mind.

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Great, great.  

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All right, then wrapping up: What are the best metrics for measuring automation’s impact on our sales pipelines and our conversion rates?  

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How can we measure that?

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So I would say it’s about the sales cycle or your conversion rate or your cost per acquisition.  

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You should actually start by mapping out your entire sales cycle from attract to close—especially since marketing has become so omnichannel.  

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If you’re just starting out, I’d much rather you map it out and then build everything and then run it.  

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If you’re getting more leads than your team can handle or your pipeline is picking up—that’s when you start implementing automation.  

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From there, to measure how automation is doing for your sales cycle, conversion rate, or CPA—you split test it.  

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You run separate campaigns, separate ads—whatever it might be—bring them to a different landing page, and split test this.  

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Determine what you are currently doing—is the automation doing better? Is it helping the team?  

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With automation and AI, it should be an *asset* to your team—it shouldn’t replace them.  

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In some cases it might in the future, but for the vast majority of businesses we work with, it is built in as an asset.  

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You look at time needed to complete something.  

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You look at the entire sales cycle—if it’s six months, is there a way to bring it down to even five and a half months?  

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What does that look like to our conversion rate? What does it look like for our CPA?  

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Take all these things and start having this recurring cycle of analyzing the data.  

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If there are more people on your team, then it’s more time involved.  

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You take all those things combined—the cost is people, the software, the ads.  

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You have the sales cost, commission—and match all those business numbers with the marketing and sales.  

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That’s how you can really determine if automation is actually helping your entire system or not.

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Perfect. Well, thank you for that everybody.  

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And thank you to those following along, watching or listening.  

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Next week we’re going to dive into AI-powered personalization and how automation can improve our engagement and conversions.

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And dive in there.  

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So thank you for following along and we’ll see you soon.

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