How To Save Your Business Time & Money Through Automation

Here are a few ways you can identify the right processes to automate within your business.

This article takes about 3 minutes to read

I hope you enjoy it!

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Today, I am going to reveal how to identify automation opportunities within your business, which will save you time and money.

Half of the battle when looking to implement automation is ensuring that you choose the correct processes and tasks.

Unfortunately, a lot of organisations select the first "manual" process that comes to mind and begin to automate it.

What a lot of businesses don't realise is that the selection process needs to go beyond whether a process or task is manual.

The Three Golden Outcomes Of ANY Automation

Not all processes that can be automated are worth automating.

In fact, the automation of any business process needs to have a significant positive impact on your business to make it worth it.

This impact needs to far outweigh the resources, time and effort spent automating it.

For an automation to make business sense, it needs to achieve the following three outcomes:

• The automation will save your team hours of time per week (at least 5+)
• The automation will reduce the costs associated with the process (labour and opportunity costs)
• The automation will eliminate the risk of manual errors from occurring

Now that we have outlined each automation's three key outcomes, let's dive into the three ways to identify eligible processes.

3 Ways To Identify The Right Processes & Tasks To Automate

#1 - Is the task time-consuming?

These tasks are performed semi-regularly, however, often take individual employees or teams a large amount of time.

Think about any larger project that your marketing, sales or customer service teams have been asked to deliver in recent memory.

From a marketing or sales standpoint, these tasks typically involve investigating the traits and behaviours of your contacts.

Automating these tasks will save countless hours of sifting through data, to bring on-demand database insights.

These practical insights can be used for any future campaigns where time can be better spent strategising, executing and testing.

Examples

• Identifying the current buyer's journey stage of each of your contacts within your CRM
• Identifying which leads within your database are marketing qualified and are ready to be handed over to sales

#2 - Is the process or task repetitive?

Repetitive tasks are at times soul-sucking and can be one of the biggest factors in your organisation losing out on opportunities.

Think about any processes or tasks across your marketing, sales or customer service teams that are actioned on a regular basis.

Automating these will have a far larger impact than automating those which are executed sporadically.

Examples:

• Creating customer service tickets or sales deals within your respective pipelines
• Answering customers' common frequently asked questions through live chat and via email
• Manually sending emails to prospects or customers once they meet a certain set of pre-requisites

#3 - Is the process or task prone to human error?

Human error is defined as something that has been done that was "not intended by the person".

This form of error is typically found in processes and tasks requiring writing and analysis.

These automations not only eliminate human error but will raise the quality of work and decrease time spent on correcting errors.

Examples:

• Your sales team sends a follow-up email to prospects after a meeting, call or key engagement
• Calculating and analysing campaign performance across different channels and consolidating the results

If a process or task meets one of these requirements and meets all three "Golden Outcomes", then it is worth automating.

Reach out if you want to brainstorm some ideas about automating your processes and tasks, as I am always happy to help!