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How can startups automate processes to save time and money

It is possible to automate many elements of a business while adding your own flair to make it as personalised as possible. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it can be accomplished.  Startups tend to focus on providing high-touch, personalised experiences because they are worried about losing leads.

And the process tends to be:

  • Conventional, following up on emails through the customer journey
  • Very manual and time-consuming

Through my experience working with small business owners, I know many are worried that automating causes a lack of personalisation that can affect their relationship with the customer. That is a fallacy.

Little do we know that,

  • Marketing automation is credited for improving the quality of leads generated by 60 per cent of the people who use it. 
  • Automation in sales boosts productivity within the organisation by 14.5 per cent while bringing down marketing costs by 12.2 per cent.

If you are a product or service-based business, it will serve you well to streamline your processes so that your brand will become more proficient, attractive, and tech-savvy in the eye of your audiences.

The key is to strategically insert human elements, your personality, and flair into every step of your funnel so that your audiences think that you are addressing them personally. The key is to strike the right balance between automation and personalisation to hone that relationship.

The benefits of automating your business

  • Saving time, shorten your sales cycle
  • Increase in revenue
  • Higher productivity
  • Improved scalability

Also Read: How Intelligent Automation can help power the future workplace

My agency and I have used tons of automation tools over the years, and here are some of our favourites:

  • Calendly helps you to schedule easily so that customers can book appointments without you doing it manually.
  • Mailchimp, Flodesk, Activecampaign helps you to organise your email drip campaigns so that you can send automated emailers and reminder emails to a dormant audience with just a few steps. The key is to learn how to organise your audience segmentation so that your marketing efforts become more personalised.
  • Pandadoc, Docusign for templating all your contracts, which will help you save time by creating, managing and e-signing documents easily. 
  • Hootsuite to streamline posting across social media channels more efficiently. My team uses the platform to retrieve analytics across multiple accounts and also community management without having to juggle different logins.
  • Freshbooks, Quickbooks. Even when it comes to collecting payment, service businesses can stay on top of failed billing charges using trigger tools to update their credit card details or even prompt customer by sending automated notifications so that they can make payment before the deadline.
  • Slack, a communication tool to communicate with team members and clients without having to worry about emails.
  • Trello, Monday.com, Asana, Notion, Basecamp, Lark are essential project management tools to help you work across team to create, assigns and communicate tasks. This will help you keep everyone working on one or multiple projects on the same page.
  • Zapier to move information between apps and platforms based on rules you set. Zapier is our agency’s favourite tool because it helps us connect apps and sort out our repetitive tasks, like updating client’s on incoming leads, easily.
  • Hubspot, Zoho, Keap, Streak. Having a CRM is crucial, especially for a service-based business, because you have to sort and analyse all your leads to make sure that you will respond to them correctly. It is also essential when working with multiple salespeople because they will need adequate information attached to every lead to upsell and cross-sell. Our agency uses streak CRM because it sits within Gmail, so we don’t have to go back and forth between our inbox and a separate CRM. Having it within one dashboard makes it a super seamless experience. 

Start shifting responsibilities of routine human tasks to machine learning so that you can work smarter and not harder!

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