3 Automations Every Business Needs
By Clayton Fujimura - eGuide Senior Analyst
We all love the idea of automation - it’s the promise that you can take the most time consuming and uninteresting aspects of our work and configure a software program to do those for us. Fantastic!
Even still, most business owners do not realize how much time they are losing by not working towards automation in their business processes. As a solo entrepreneur or owner of a small business, there are MANY automations that you should be considering to make your day to day more efficient and effective. We wanted to prime your thinking by including 3 of our must haves for any organization.
1. Automated Follow Up for Outstanding Sales
Whether you are using hello sign, docusign, honeybook, or other eSigning software, you can configure your proposal or contracting software to follow up with your client’s automatically when they’ve received a proposal but have not signed it. If you hate template emails, many contracting software allow you to write a custom email reminding the potential client that they have a proposal pending.
It is normal for potential clients to forget or slow down the pipeline right as we approach signature time. This automation will remind you to prompt unsigned contracts for signature, and result in more contracts executed in less time, with less manual processes.
2. New Project Triggers/Notifications
As soon as a client has signed a contract, it's time to get to work. One of the most common pitfalls for small and medium sized businesses is delaying onboarding. This delay can often result in starting new projects off on the wrong foot, and establish an uphill battle to success.
Create an automation that triggers whenever a client signs a contract. The automation could alert your team that a new contract has been signed or it can automatically trigger an onboarding task template (more on that later)... or both! Depending on your software ecosystem, you may benefit more from a notification, or you may be able to fully customize the initial onboarding task template. Exploring tools like Zapier, Power Automate, or the built in workflow automations from your project management software is a great first step in exploring what option will be best for you.
3. Task Templates: Using Checklists as a Tool
Every business needs a project management system of some kind and that project management system needs task templates and checklists for workflows that repeat. We can get into a little history of economics lesson here… but I’ll spare you that. Suffice it to say: when it comes to business, the efficiency of many can outweigh the speed of one when workflows help to standardize operations. It takes wisdom and experience to craft a task template, but once the process is in place, it’s easy to grow and train new team members in less time, who produce work with more accuracy.
Task templates make it possible to delegate and scale while still maintaining the high level of quality that your clients are used to.
Have a look at your project management system, be it Airtable, Monday.com, Trello, Asana, or whatever else, and ask yourself: What products or services can be templatized? How can I easily recreate those templates in my project management system?
Automation is Only the Beginning
Automation is not as complex as it may sound. Even if you are only able to automate a single human action, let’s say scheduling a discovery call with a client when they fill out a website form, you’ll be able to save yourself countless hours a year. This will make you more focussed on the aspects of your business that require the most expertise, rather than wondering if you followed up with that new prospect or not.
There are all kinds of resources online and within the software platform you are already using. Research what other businesses are doing to automate their processes using the tools you are already comfortable with.
And of course, reach out to us if you feel lost or overwhelmed at any point. Automation is what we do here at eGuide and, whatever challenge you're facing with configuration, we’ve probably seen it before. Give us a call or email and let us know what you’re struggling with!
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