Automation: Can It Be Both Cool and Useful?

I have a love/hate relationship with automation.

On one hand, good automation can:

1. Save yourself time by reducing manual steps like ‘copy and pasting’ between tools.
2. Cut down on labour costs because you don’t need to pay people to do follow ups, send invoices, or manually complete steps.
3. Reduce throughput time on processes. You can get paid or close deals faster because there aren’t delays between steps.
4. Automatically send timely messaging to communication channels after a deal is closed, a consultation call is booked, or a client issue is submitted.
5. Increase quality control because the automation should do the same thing every time and it doesn’t forget or skip over steps.

But automation has a dark side. For example:

1. A lot of automations I’ve seen have a high ‘cool’ factor but have very little usefulness to me or the teams I work with. Their ‘coolness’ has overshadowed their ‘usefulness.’
2. Automations are not ‘set it and forget it’ - they need to be documented, organized, maintained, updated, and troubleshooted when they break.
3. You can’t automate everything. Sometimes, my client’s default question for everything is, ‘Can that be automated?’ When the answer is ‘no’ or ‘it depends’ they look disappointed even though the ‘basic’ thing they want automated is actually incredibly complex.

I have heard, ‘I should be able to click a button and 10 things should happen automatically,’ more times than you can count.

Automation should be cool AND useful.

So, what should you automate?

Well, before answering that question, a better question is, ‘Are your processes documented?’

If they are, the first thing I would look to automate is the slowest step in your process.

For example, if step 6 of your sales process is to send a prospect a proposal and that takes 5 days on average to produce could you cut that down by:

• First, creating a template for your standard proposal in a Google Doc with fields
• Then, when you move a deal into the ‘Send Proposal’ stage of your CRM…
• A form is automatically sent to the Salesperson with the information required to complete the proposal
• Once the form is submitted, the information is dropped into the Google Doc template
• A task is then automatically created for the Sales or Finance Manager to review the filled in proposal template with a due date of the next day
• Once approved, a task goes to the salesperson to send the proposal along with a series of followup emails, texts, and phone calls if needed
• Once sent, if the prospect views the proposal or starts to click around on the company’s website, the salesperson is alerted for more timely and immediate follow up while the prospect is hot and may have questions

You get the idea.

The goal is to use automation to reduce the slowest step in a key process.

Once this step is automated as best as possible, move onto the next slowest step until enough automation is added to reduce these slowest steps.

But remember…

Just like documenting processes, document the automation so that it can be worked on in the future:

• Who set up the automation?
• What does the automation do?
• When was the automation set up?
• Where does the automation live?
• Why was the automation set up?
• How does the automation work?

Another initial place to look for automation opportunities is your team communication tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

The power of these tools is that they can be set up with channels based on important subjects in your business.

Why not send key events in other parts of your business into Slack channels as automatic notifications?

• Every time a consultation call is booked: who booked, what company, how much revenue?
• Every time a deal is closed: what is the size of the deal and what products?
• Every time a ticket is submitted: who submitted, what is the issue?
• Every time a feedback survey is received: who submitted, what was the rating?
• Every time a testimonial is received: who submitted, what did they say?
• Every time a client requests to cancel: who submitted, what is the reason for cancellation, can we save them?

The idea here is to celebrate milestones or be aware of issues asap.

The longer it takes for people to see issues, the worse than they can become.

Also, if people don’t see successes, they might be wondering how well the business is doing.

Finally, think about how to automate anything repetitive which is highly administrative:

• Followups/chasing
• Scheduling
• Email ie. canned responses
• Updates (metrics, spreadsheets, etc)
• Creating training docs or materials
• Update statuses, dates, key events
• Cleaning and organizing (ie. cloud storage folders, databases, or other lists)
• Refresh, revise, clarify, or update steps in processes
• Sending or saving video recordings
• Create filters or rules
• Cold outreach to build prospect lists
• Lead qualification
• Stress test or audit systems for improper usage
• Maintenance on systems or processes
• Research/testing
• Creating documentation
• Receiving requests (forms, etc)

Let’s use automation to make our lives easier.

Not just because it’s cool!