Sales and Marketing Automation and Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

You may ask - what has Sales and Marketing Automation got to do with Abraham Maslow? And for those of you not familiar with the gentleman in question - he introduced the now very well-known ’Hierarchy of Needs Pyramid’ in his seminal work ’A Theory of Human Motivation’. A significant portion of that work is about the need for people to feel acceptance, recognition and reward from their fellow human beings - friends, family, peers and acquaintances.

Social media has engendered a mini arms race where celebrities and wannabes vie with each other to acquire certain significant levels of followers as well as various aspects of ’points scoring’ - aiming initially to get to 100,000 or 1,000,000 followers, and then be in a position to compete with the likes of Queen of Instagram - Selena Gomez.

Social Media Influencers are a relatively new phenomena, and are increasingly replacing the newspaper and magazine columnists of old. This has become a whole industry by itself, and there are various motivations at play here - financial and otherwise. A very significant part is the recognition element - where individuals feel compelled to share increasingly more shocking and outrageous images to harvest as many likes and social shares as they can. Beyond Abraham Maslow, there is also an element of gamification - but how does all the relate back to automation?

In our context, and at the heart of Affino’s Sales and Marketing Automation lies another hierarchical pyramid of progress - that we call the ’Customer Ladder’. Its 5 stages are as follows:

SUSPECT > PROSPECT > CUSTOMER > REGULAR > ADVOCATE

The idea is that those 5 stages are the different levels that your customers are at, and you need to figure out the motivations and incentives required to keep moving them up a stage - up-sell etc. until such a point that they become full converts or ’Advocate’, and quite unprompted, serve to reinforce and promote your products and brands as well as supporting them in other ways.

Most people’s motivations are typically far from altruistic, so you need to figure out where and how to capture each target group’s attention, and then how to motivate them towards the next task / level.

For Affino we use both public and private means to engage - the public side being represented by ’badges’ sort of like medals awarded for various acts / tasks - and associated points values - so you can have various leaderboards - overall and within categories. These points and activities can trigger any number of different resultant rewards - including rise of status / being promoted to VIP, gaining access to exclusive areas / content, and receiving monetary credits or discounts. It is up to you how much you make overt - badges etc. or if you run everything in background, so the customers are only aware on their personal account screens as to the status of their loyalty points / credits. The former way is more gamification enabled / FMCG while the latter may be more suitable for certain types of Professional Services.