Can Technology Actually Make You More Personal?

By Mary Matton on January 9, 2020

We talk a lot about creating one-to-one experiences with your buyers. Technology can help you create personal experiences if you use it to your advantage. Here are some tips. 

A former manager and mentor of mine once told me, “Technology without strategy is useless. Technology should be implemented to facilitate an already established strategy.”

I think about that quote a lot when I’m thinking about the MarTech space, and how people choose to assemble their MarTech stack today.

At Alyce, we see one common thread in our customers’ sales and marketing strategies, which has heavily influenced the way they’ve built their tech stacks and has heavily influenced why they’ve chosen Alyce to be an integral part of that tech stack. A key component of these marketing and sales strategies is that companies want to do everything they can to get closer to their prospects and customers by providing them with personal experiences. 

Are you looking to make your marketing and sales more personal? Check out our Ultimate Guide to Personal Experience for tips. 

Our customers (and the market as a whole) has recognized that historically the technology available to us as sellers and marketers has largely dictated the way we interact with our buyers:

For the majority of human history, we’ve lived in what I would call the “Relationship Era”: the era where one-to-one person-to-person interactions meant everything, no real technology to facilitate those interactions, so that’s how business was done. 

From there, we quickly realized that we could reach a lot more people and get a lot more at-bats if we took an activity-based model, and we started pounding the phones and making dozens of calls every day to get the word out about our product or service (think of all the cold calls and telemarketing you got back in the 90s). That’s what I would call the “Smile & Dial Era.”

As we moved into the 2000s, we had the true proliferation of marketing and sales technology, largely due to the rise of the internet and more specifically, email.  Tools like Constant Contact and Mailchimp started to take off in the early 2000s, which for the first time gave companies the ability to send emails to as many people as they wanted with a couple clicks. HubSpot and Marketo were founded in 2005 and 2006 respectively, which took that ability to automate to the next level.  Companies like Outreach and Salesloft came around in 2011 and introduced a similar concept, but automated sales actions instead of marketing. Aptly, I call this the “Automation Era.”  

Because hindsight is 20/20, it’s easy to look back and see that we as marketers leveraged technology to do one primary thing: scale reach.

But in doing so, we left behind something even more important: our ability to provide personal, buyer-centric experiences to our prospects.

Our interactions with prospects became cold, automated, and thoughtless touch points: call cadences, bulk email blasts, and annoying drip campaigns that never seem to end. 

And because everyone started marketing and selling this way, every prospect became annoyed and overwhelmed with the constant barrage of generic touches that had nothing to do with them most of the time.  

The best marketers have realized that this is happening. They’ve realized you can choose to be a company that markets and sells to people in one of two ways:

The choice is yours, and the choice is obvious. There is a renewed priority to provide personal experiences to prospects throughout the buyer’s journey wherever possible.  

We’re in the Personal Experience Era, and elite marketers are assembling the tools that allow them to deliver these personal experiences at scale.

Your entire tech stack should be aligned to this strategy of creating better and more personal experiences.

Enter, Alyce

Alyce is the personal experience platform that helps sales and marketing teams generate responses and build meaningful relationships with their prospects through 1-1 gifting. It’s the most effective way to get closer to your buyers and start a conversation with your buyers by delivering personal gifts.

For that reason, for our customers, it’s become a central component of their outbound tech stack. But we know gifting alone can’t be the only component. Delivering personal experiences is more than just a single act, which is why Alyce should fit within a tech ecosystem that enables you to provide engaging personal experiences, all the time, in a scalable way.  

From an outbound marketing and sales perspective in particular, you need a stack that enables you to connect with the right people, at the right time, with personal experiences, at scale and within your workflow.

Let’s take it step-by-step to unpack these different components here:

Right People, at the Right Time: Marketing Intelligence & Using Buyer Intent Data

If you don’t know who your top prospects or accounts are, or when the best times to engage with them are, then you’re already behind. A tech stack optimized to deliver personal experiences should be comprised of Market Intelligence tools, and Intent or Predictive Data platforms in order to identify the highest value prospects to interact with, right now.

Identify High-Value Prospects with Market Intelligence Tools like Clearbit, DiscoverOrg, Zoominfo, and others to help you understand who exactly fits within your ideal customer profile, and who the best people within those accounts might buy. TL,DR: they help you know the basics of who your ideal buyers are.

Identify High-Intent Prospects with Intent & Predictive Data to take your targeting strategy to a whole new level. With these tools, you not only know who your best-fit people are, but you know what they’re interested in professionally, what they’re researching, and when they’re active on these subjects.

When you’re optimizing for personal experiences, this is INCREDIBLY important, because this information is what allows you to be confident that you’re talking to the right people, and delivering them a message that is beneficial to them, at the right time.

Just as important, It also gives you the tools to know the people you should invest in more heavily.

Market Intelligence & Intent Data + Alyce

Having the data is an awesome and necessary start to identifying high-value high-intent prospects. But if you aren’t investing into that relationship by delivering a highly customized personal experience, that data isn’t nearly as effective as it could be. Why would you send every prospect the same series of emails and calls when you know some are objectively more important than others? Your emails, and calls, and InMails are still swimming in a swamp of dozens of others, and being ignored. 

The higher value and higher intent your prospect is, you want to make sure the way you engage with them is just as high in value. 

Injecting Alyce into that mix allows you to choose the highest value buyers, and allows you to deliver a highly personal experience through personal gifting that gets their attention, shows them you’ve invested thought and care into the relationship, which ultimately makes them more likely to respond.

Scalability, Within Your Workflow: Marketing Automation & Sales Engagement

Scaling and Coordinating Marketing Actions with marketing automation is something that everyone is familiar with. Marketing automation is extremely powerful, but most marketers today use it to scale generic and quite frankly boring marketing activities. Marketers use it as a way to make their own lives easier, and quickly forget that there’s a recipient on the other end. What marketers should be thinking is: How do you take my drip campaign or event invitation or content offer, and make it personal?

Scaling and Coordinating Sales Actions with sales engagement tools like Outreach and Salesloft essentially means maximizing the reach of your sales team with automation. And reach is necessary, but today most of that automated outreach is cold and generic. It’s pretty obvious to a prospect when they’re enrolled in a cadence or a sequence, and it makes them feel like just another name on your database, not a person you personally are trying to do business with. 

It doesn’t have to be that way though. Sales engagement and marketing automation can be a delivery mechanism for delivering personal experiences at scale.

Marketing Automation and Sales Engagement + Alyce

Injecting Alyce into your sales cadence is what elevates your sales sequence from a generic series of sales steps, to a personal conversation with your buyers. 

Take a generic sales sequence like this…

 Pretty cookie-cutter, boring, and not a lot that stands out and makes you want to respond.

Adding Alyce into the mix, you transform the conversation, by making it more personal, and treating your buyer like an actual person, not just a name you enroll in a cadence.

All of a sudden, you’re creating a personal relationship with your prospect, and improving that relationship with every interaction, all because of Alyce’s ability to make you more personal. And that’s what it’s all about.

This is a small snapshot of how your outbound strategy can include personal technology to deliver personal experiences, and how Alyce is a vital part of that. But for your entire tech stack, you should be thinking how every tool can be optimized to help you drive the most personal experiences possible for your customers and prospects, at every step of their journey.