4. Balancing Human Interaction and Automation in Early Sales
- Abishek Murthy CGO at Locus, Ex-COS at Freshworks
- Khadim Batti Co-founder & CEO, Whatfix
Abishek advises founders to prioritize human interaction over early automation for valuable customer feedback, focusing on when it’s truly necessary to automate.
The way I was thinking about it is, do you want more feedback on the product? Or do you already know what’s working and what you need to double down? If you already know what’s working, it doesn’t matter if you automate it or put a salesperson in front.
I would think about early automation in a plain vanilla way. You either put bodies in the problem or money in the product. When you automate something, you put money into the problem.
If you don't want any more feedback, and you can get, say, 10,000 leads if you open the floodgates to your product, then you should automate it. But if you know that your deal velocity will not go up by 20X and you don't know how to get it there, why automate it?
Figure out if it is worthwhile to automate it and if there is an inflection where you should do the automation in the journey.
I think automation is also a money versus people problem. If you can get a five lakh resource or a ten lakh resource to solve for X number of leads, and if you know that you only get X number of leads a month, I will probably do that over automation so that I can get more out of the person.
I can learn what people don't like, what people want, etc. You can get more intel from people. People will interact directly with users and follow up with them, and users will respond to them more, so you can get more out of them than automation.
I would do that. But it depends again on your team’s velocity, number of leads, etc. So, if you’re saying you’re seeing early traction, wait for the traction to blossom. Once the traction blossoms and once you’re seeing that, damn, I can’t do this with reps, then think about automation. I still think it’s worthwhile having folks in.”
Khadim builds on the importance of human engagement, explaining how scaling introduces communication challenges and the need for structured collaboration across departments.
As you scale, the number one problem is your communication. The second problem you will start facing is the building of silos. You will observe pockets building up because everybody wants to protect their turf. As you scale, people don’t work for the company. They work for their teams.
These silos can lead to friction across the departments. One key thing to break them is how you set up the OKRs that help in collaborations, setting up additional meetings, and setting rules of engagement for multiple scenarios across functions and teams.
Of course, some people may not like it, but it is better to be clear than be ambiguous. Clarity is most important. In spite of only focusing on this when conflict arises, be proactive about your communication.
Set up coordination between different department leaders. We used to have once-a-month leadership meetings with all the leaders, which would last five or six hours. That became difficult to manage as we grew because we made sure everybody talked.
Now, we do 75 minutes every Wednesday, and each leader gets around 5 – 6 minutes to present and align.
They ask for help from the different departments, clarify their dependencies on each other, and mention what they have achieved and what they’re looking for. This helps everybody get on the same page.
Doing this every week helps identify the core problem. If you keep hearing the same things often, you will know what problem to fix and how.
We started addressing communication issues and silos at scale once we began to listen and recognized it was a problem. This challenge often worsens in companies because we tend to procrastinate.
Departments like Sales, Marketing, and a few other departments often have strong personalities who can be loud and assertive, and in the midst of this, we can overlook addressing the development of these silos. This can have a very negative impact on customer experience.
When your customers raise an issue, people start fighting amongst themselves about whether it’s a Sales problem, a product problem, or an engineering problem, and nobody acknowledges the error. They fight.
Some of this can also be addressed by how you train or scale your talent.
At this point, in our organization, all our customer-facing departments, such as sales, marketing, or customer success, have enablement materials or workshops prepared for them on how to engage with customers and how to support and make them successful.