Google was manually editing and merging Perl scripts to get web scraping data almost every day early on. Yahoo manually verified content and added it to lists with hand typed summaries fir years, even up to the time Google came in the scene.
You are right that some businesses scale better doing high touch customer service like this. In the case of Pilot, you have the lead sales guy and accounting domain expert (CEO) asking SaaS customers to schedule enterprise service sales calls with him.
Which makes total sense. What he’s not automating is setting up Marketo or Hubspot and Drip or Constant Contact and committing to some CRM system that is both impersonal and adds friction when you’re going for quality over quantity.
He could hire BDRs and CSMs or outsource and spam and set up AI and knowledge bases, and possibly scale up faster.
But not only would that take away the personal touch and competitive advantage, he’d lose the opportunity to educate himself on what real customers really need.
Not to mention all the time spent evaluating tools and setting up automation and negotiating contracts that lock you in to a specific process that might not be what you want 2 years down the line when your business changes.
You are right that some businesses scale better doing high touch customer service like this. In the case of Pilot, you have the lead sales guy and accounting domain expert (CEO) asking SaaS customers to schedule enterprise service sales calls with him.
Which makes total sense. What he’s not automating is setting up Marketo or Hubspot and Drip or Constant Contact and committing to some CRM system that is both impersonal and adds friction when you’re going for quality over quantity.
He could hire BDRs and CSMs or outsource and spam and set up AI and knowledge bases, and possibly scale up faster.
But not only would that take away the personal touch and competitive advantage, he’d lose the opportunity to educate himself on what real customers really need.
Not to mention all the time spent evaluating tools and setting up automation and negotiating contracts that lock you in to a specific process that might not be what you want 2 years down the line when your business changes.