Smart Automation: What You SHOULD Automate in Your Business

Back in December we talked about what processes you shouldn’t automate in your business: high-stakes client interactions, complex decision making processes, creative and strategic work, evolving processes, client specific customizations, and crisis management & sensitive situations. To summarize: any processes that are inconsistent, custom, or require a human touch. Since we’ve covered what NOT to automate (to read more, click here), it’s time to talk about what you SHOULD automate! 

As a general rule, consistent, repetitive processes are where you want to focus that automation magic. I can’t tell you how much time it would save us if my husband and I had a magic automation to fold the laundry and wash & put away the dishes; the Roomba we got to help us keep the floor clean has been revolutionary (especially with two dogs and a toddler). It’s exactly these sorts of tasks that you want to automate in your business: monotonous housekeeping, all those boring tasks that have to happen for your business to run but hold you back from having the time for tasks that would let your business thrive. Things like data entry, sending follow up emails, etc. The goal is to make your life easier and your business better by saving you time and mental energy to focus on your long-term goals! 

Just remember – an automation is only as good as the process it’s automating. Make sure that your processes are efficient and straightforward before you start trying to build them into whatever your software of choice is, and make sure you (or your tech guy) know how to set it up correctly so that the automation actually saves you time. It defeats the purpose if the automation breaks down every time it runs, and you’ll end up spending more time trying to fix it than it would’ve taken you to just do the task manually. 

6 Processes Worth Automating

Client Onboarding Elements

There’s probably a list of information that you need from clients during the onboarding process that you’ll need to get started on the service they’re hiring you to provide. Since this process is fairly repetitive, there’s no use wasting time bouncing back and forth across emails for weeks trying to collect all the necessary information needed to get the ball rolling! Set up an email sequence into an automated client onboarding process that feels personal but saves you from having to write 10,000 emails to get the client to submit all the necessary information to start the project! (Creating a form to use for this is a plus!) And set up your automation to go ahead and organize all of that information in a way that makes sense for your business on your end, so that it’s easy to find exactly what you need instead of clicking on every file submitted or re-opening the form often to find the specific information you’re looking for. 

Routine Communications

We all know the unspoken rule: if you don’t check-in with someone within 24 hours before plans, assume the plans are cancelled. Okay, maybe that’s not the rule for business meetings, but it’s still a good idea to send meeting confirmations and reminders. Likewise, sending follow-up emails after a meeting, reminders about deadlines and upcoming events, business updates, and marketing emails are all routine communications that it’s a great idea to make sure you send out with regularity. They’re also incredibly time consuming – unless you automate them! 

You still want a human touch in your communications with partners and clients, so make sure to write authentically when you set up recurring emails like appointment confirmations and event reminders. Depending on how much your services vary between clients, you might be able to fully automate follow-up emails, but for many cases it’ll be better to have a general format you use each time where you can include situation-specific information when needed and send them out at the appropriate time automatically. Business updates and newsletters you’ll obviously need to write separately each time you publish one, but automating aspects of the creation process as much as possible can be a massive time saver. Make sure to show some emotion in your routine communications so that your audience doesn’t feel like they’re talking to a robot!

Data Entry and Management

Few tasks are as tedious as data management and data entry. Luckily, automations give you the power to automatically input and organize new data into your existing database so that you can track project progress, financial data, and anything else you may need. Consider Airtable if you’re in need of a data management software with automation options!

Scheduling and Calendar Management

Finding time when you’re free to meet with friends and potential clients feels like solving an impossible puzzle, especially when it usually takes a few days of emailing back and forth to finally find a time that works for more than two people. Save yourself time by automating your calendar management. This also helps tremendously for managing your team, planning trainings and meetings, etc. by giving you more time to focus on the work that’s important to you. Here are a few tools we find useful:

• Calendly 
• TidyCal 
• Cal.com 

Repetitive Task Management

Do you use the same document template for each client during specific parts of a project? It’s a good idea to automate the creation of those documents! Giving clients a set format to work with for interest forms, invoices, and payment reminders makes your life easier and, if you get repeat customers, their life easier since they’ve seen it before while working with you. Even if it’s a standard template document you use for part of the project, say you’re a marketing specialist and it’s the doc you use to create a launch strategy, the creation of these can be automated based on when a client signs on for “Launch Strategy” in your CRM. Repetitive tasks like these can be managed easier, both internally and externally, using automations. 

Reporting and Analytics

You want to keep an eye on what’s happening in your business. Are you growing? How quickly? By how much? This is where some data analysis comes into play, looking at business metrics like revenue and tracking team performance overall. Doing this by hand is pretty tedious, but automating the metric reporting processes for your business can save you a lot of time and hassle. With the added benefit that you can jump straight into understanding what direction your business is headed without as significant of a time delay from when the data was collected and without the headache of manual entry and analysis. Make your data automations work for you and your business needs! I highly recommend Databox for easy, automated, real-time reporting across your tech stack. 

Conclusion

Now that we have a good idea of what to automate, the next step is to start automating smartly. This includes learning how to automate your processes, making sure they’re efficient, and prioritizing the automations that will have the biggest impact on your productivity. Target the “housekeeping” tasks that take up the most of your time first to have the biggest impact. Once your automation is set up, track how much time you’re saving and how well your team members and customers are handling interacting with the automation to make sure you’ve been successful in saving your future self hours of work! 

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