Automating your business is one of the best moves you can make to attract the right clients and grow your revenue. Sales and marketing automation saves you time and money by taking care of the tedious repetitive tasks that you do every day, such as following up with leads and sending appointment reminders.
However, there is a right way to automate, and if you’re doing it wrong you won’t reap all the benefits that automation has to offer. If you’re ready to reduce costs and increase productivity and profit through automation, then follow these tips to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your investment!
Get Clear on What You Want to Automate
In order for automation to help you meet your business goals, you need to know what you want to automate and why. Maybe you want to automate a specific task, such as sending invoices or payment reminders, in order to save you the time of having to do it yourself or the money you would spend hiring someone else to do it for you.
Or perhaps you want to automate your marketing by creating a drip marketing campaign to guide leads through your sales pipeline, so that you don’t have to send individual emails to every person who responds to your lead magnet.
Once you know what you want and why, you can set automation goals that allow you to easily see your progress and make tweaks or improvements to get you the results that you want.
Start Small
Automation is pretty amazing, and it can be easy to start to see it as a magical cure-all that you want to apply to your entire business, but it works best when you use it intentionally and apply it individually to independent sections of your business.
When you can look at the smaller moving parts of larger tasks and automate them over time, it makes it easier to see what is working and what isn’t, and to make any necessary adjustments.
Fully automating small repetitive sales and marketing tasks as opposed to trying to overhaul your entire business structure is the best way to make automation work for you.
Train Your Team
Adapting to new technology can take time, but with the right training and attitude, you and your team can learn how to make automation an essential part of your business strategy.
When you are excited about and love technology yourself, that energy can be contagious, but it’s important to remember that people often balk at change, and the more testing and training you can do in a fun and open environment the more likely your team is to embrace automation.
Make Sure Automation Is Right for You
Automation is an excellent tool for helping small businesses to grow, but before you start trying to implement automation you need to make sure that it’s right for your organization.
That means taking a look at how much the initial investment will cost (including the cost of training employees), and testing whether it will actually be more efficient than your current system.
Supervise!
We all know that left unsupervised, automation can develop self-aware artificial intelligence that means the end to human kind as we know it. But for real, while automation is great for saving you time and money and making your business run more efficiently, you still need employees to supervise and manage your automation software!
Want to learn more about how you can use automation to grow your small business? Schedule a call with us today, and let us show you how it’s done!
