Do not automate a sales process you do not have

Requests to automate go-to-market usually arrive as a tool. We want outbound sequences. We want a chatbot on the site. We want leads enriched automatically.

Sometimes that is the right tool. More often it is a tool in search of a process.

Name the process first

A request that names the tool before the process is one we turn down, and not out of stubbornness. If there is nothing to measure before, there will be nothing to show after.

Automation makes an existing process faster and more consistent. It does not create one. Pointing it at a sales motion that lives in three people's heads produces the same confusion, at volume.

So write it down first. Who do you sell to. How do they find you. What happens to a new contact, step by step, and who does each step today. Where do people wait. Where does work get dropped.

You will usually find the problem before you finish the page, and it is rarely the one the tool was meant to solve.

Measure before, or do not claim after

Pick a number that matters and read it before you change anything. How long a new contact waits for a first reply. How many conversations reach a proposal. Whatever reflects the step you think is broken.

Without the before, every result afterwards is a feeling. With it, you know whether the work paid for itself, and so does whoever approved it.

Start where people wait

The best first candidate is almost never the glamorous one. It is the handoff where a contact sits untouched because someone has to copy it from one system to another.

Fix that. It is unexciting, it is measurable, and the person who was doing the copying gets their time back for the part of the job that needs a human.

Keep a person in the conversation

Automate the movement of information. Be careful about automating the relationship. A buyer can tell when nobody is there.

If you want to automate go-to-market and cannot yet describe the process in a page, that page is the first deliverable. Bring us what you have.