The Law of Diminishing Returns: A Practical Test of Sales Efficiency
The debate between manual personalization and automation is often ideological. We have underpinned it with data. In a four week experiment at dealcode, two Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) were tasked with targeting a clearly defined segment (mid-sized e commerce companies). Each employee invested about five hours daily in manual research and writing 40 to 50 highly personalized emails. The result was sobering: the performance of these labor intensive manual campaigns was only about 10% better than that of intelligently automated campaigns, which were run at scale by a single person. This figure raises a critical strategic question: Does a marginal gain of 10% justify an exponentially higher investment of time and resources? From a business perspective, the answer is a clear no. The practical test impressively demonstrates the economic principle of diminishing returns in sales. The last few percentage points of perfection through manual labor cost a disproportionate amount of effort.
