Last week I attended the Dreamforce expo at Salesforce.com. There were a wide variety of companies (partners or Salesforce.com) that were exhibiting there. I probably talked two about two dozen companies trying to understand their offering.

With about fifteen of those companies I gave them my business card and asked them to follow up on “specific topics of interest”. Most of them made notes in some way or the other.

A week later I have received notifications from twelve of those fifteen companies. All of them were based on pre-defined templates. It was personalized but being in the CRM world in the last decade, I know they were all automated messages.

At least a few of those companies would have got some “hot” leads – just if they had come back to me with answers to my specific questions.

Well, answering specific questions is hard work. Automation is easy. Just feed the email address to a program and the program takes over…