Jonathan Farrington interviews Autopilot’s CEO, Michael Sharkey
Marketing automation platform Autopilot released a new type of automation tool designed to save time, increase revenue, and help companies grow.
But no, it’s not for marketing.
Instead, the company’s new tool, called CoPilot, is a sales automation system that takes the grunt work out of sales, provides more warm sales conversations, and allows salespeople to focus on what they do best: selling. Want to find out more? This week I interviewed founder and CEO: Michael Sharkey
JF: What is Sales Automation? Marketing automation, CRM, or a new combination?
MS: Talk to any sales rep in the tech world, and you’ll hear about the gap. It’s the gap between marketing and CRM. It’s not marketing automation, it’s not CRM, it fits into this gap in the market that is completely unserved.
In one corner marketing has marketing automation, in another corner sales has CRM, but there is this third corner where sales development representatives live and that’s who CoPilot focuses on. Now, imagine the grunt work taken out of the sales rep’s job. Imagine that he or she can stop being a taskmaster and spend more time creating opportunities, qualifying leads and closing business. This is
where sales automation comes in, the third spoke on the CRM/marketing automation/sales automation wheel.
JF: But doesn’t Salesforce offer “sales automation?”
MS: Some think sales automation is CRM. Salesforce can only do one-and-done blasts which have very low response rates, no analytics and follow-ups are not automated.
CoPilot removes the manual work from prospecting. Whenever a prospect engages with an outbound campaign, CoPilot can automatically send a personalized response based on that person’s actions. Interested prospects land directly into the salesperson’s inbox while the rest continue to receive automated nurturing giving teams more time to invest in engaged prospects.
JF: What kind of results can you expect with this? what will it do for you?
MS: In sales teams, the ultimate goal is predictable revenue. For every 5,000 prospects I reach out to, X percent will become qualified leads, Y percent will become
qualified opportunities and Z percent will become new closed business. Everyone talks about predictable revenue in sales by having a process, but the problem is the process of today turns salespeople into taskmasters, outputting so much energy for each of those 5,000 prospects.
The real secret sauce and “magic” of CoPilot though is the feeling when an engaged prospect who is ready to buy lands in your inbox and the first conversation you have is about getting a deal done. That’s the predictable revenue dream!
You can also listen to the audio version of this interview here: