Automate the Obvious

What tasks do you do repeatedly, day after day after day? What tasks fall through the cracks in your lead or sales or followup or work process?

These are the things to automate. You’ll save your sanity by leveraging your time and energy. Automating the routine tasks you do, or forget to do, adds consistency and efficiency to your business.

Side note: If you’re not using an automation platform, you should consider it. There are so many options depending on how large or small your company is, what your specific needs or pain points are, how many people will need to access it, what your budget is, and so forth. We, and many of our clients, use Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft may or may not be right for your business but, rest assured, there is another option which will be right. If you need help deciding which platform to use, we’re glad to help sort through the options with you.

Ok, what should you think about automating? Here are a few quick ideas:

• FAQ - if you or your employees frequently answer the same email or phone question from leads, clients, or vendors, this is easy to automate. Set up an automated email with the question and the answer, then trigger it each time you are asked. The system sends the email and records the interaction for future reference.
• Document delivery - One of our clients emails several onboarding documents to each new customer they convert in a face-to-face sales meeting. We set up their automation to be easily triggered to send the document packet to the new customer along with a welcome letter, saving our client time and hassle and giving their customer a ‘wow’ experience.
• Customer service response - When a site visitor completes your contact form, you can automate what they receive, and when and how they receive it. The faster and more meaningful the response to their inquiry, the more likely you are to convert them. Be sure to include a notification to yourself or the right employee to followup with this visitor.
• Appointment reminders - if your automation platform integrates with scheduling platforms, this is a no-brainer. If not, or if you set up your appointments manually, you can still easily automate the reminders.

The key is to think about your business and your work process to identify the repetitive tasks that suck up your time or, worse, fall through the cracks. Then automate them.

It will change your life.